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Drupal Web Hosting

Content management System (CMS) is a tool used by Web administrators to automatically track online visitors and prepare customized content for consumption, usually as HTML-based Web pages. Drupal is a free and open source modular content management system (CMS) written in the programming language PHP. Drupal is equipped with robust and powerful features and supports a wide variety of websites; be it web logs to large community driven websites. It helps its users to publish, manage and organize all the content of their websites with great ease and flexibility. Drupal can be used by a wide variety of websites and/or organizations to meet their CMS needs. These could include community web portals, discussion sites, corporate web sites, intranet applications, personal web sites/blogs, aficionado sites, e-commerce applications, resource directions, social networking sites etc. This open source software is distributed under the GPL (General Public License) and many users and developers are behind its smooth functionality and success.

Drupal is ready to use instantly after the download process is complete. Its key features include:
1. Collaborative Book: This feature allows you to setup a book or project that needs quality content and others users can be allowed or authorized to contribute content. A book is a set of pages tied together Drupal 4.7.x Drupal 5.x in sequence. These books can be used as manuals, site resource guides, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) etc.

2. Friendly URLs: Drupal utilizes Apache’s mod_rewrite to enable customizable URLs. These urls are both user friendly as well as search engine friendly.

3. Modules: Modules are primarily plug-ins for Drupal, which extend and enhance its functionality. The Drupal community has contributed greatly by providing modules with enhanced and improved functionalities like taxonomy display, jabber authentication, private messages, bookmarks, etc.

4. Online Assistance: The Drupal handbooks have proved to be of great assistance as it offers key information and references for both newbies as well as for Drupal administrators. Code documentation generated from the source code can be found on api.drupal.org.

5. Open Source: Drupal’s source code is freely available for users while adhering to the terms and conditions of GNU General Public License.

6. Personalization: The user can specify its preferences for both the content as well as the presentation and hence create a personalized environment.

7. Role based Permission System: The Drupal administrators assign permissions for specific roles and then group the uses into a role group.

8. Search: Drupal content is highly organized and well managed, making it easy to search every time.

9. User Authentication: Users can register and authenticate locally or using an external authentication source like Jabber, Blogger, LiveJournal or another Drupal website.

10. Polls: Admins and users can create polls with Drupal’s poll module and this can be easily displayed on various pages if desired.

11. Templating: Templates are created from standard HTML and PHP coding. Therefore, templating language is not necessarily required. Users can control the look of the Drupal site completely as Drupal’s theme system separates content from presentation.

12. Threaded Comments: Drupal features a threaded comment model to facilitate discussions on published content. Comments are organized chronologically, like in a forum or news group.

13. Version Control: Drupal’s version control system tracks the details of content updates which includes what exactly was modified, who made the changes as well as the date and time of the modification or changes.

14. Blogger API support: The Blogger API allows the Drupal site o be updated by many different tools. If users prefer using external tools to post and read the posts in a customized manner. Blog API module supports several XML-RPC based blogging APIs such as the Blogger API, MetaWeblog API, and most of the Movable Type API.

15. Content Syndication: Drupal allows its users to export content in RDF/RSS format for others to gather.

16. News Aggregator: The News Aggregator’s function is to cache articles to the user’s MySQL database and its caching time is user configurable. Hence, this built-in news aggregator helps in blogging news from other web sites.

17. Permalinks: All Drupal content has a permanent link or “perma link” associated with it.

18. Multi-Platform: Drupal is designed not only to be used with Apache or Microsoft IIS but users can also have Drupal running on Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows, and Mac OS X platforms.

19. Database Independence: Although most users run Drupal with MySQL, Drupal is built on top of a database abstraction layer that enables users to use Drupal with MySQL and PostgreSQL.

20. Multi Language: Drupal offers a complete framework required to create a multi lingual website, blog, and content management system or community application.

21. Analysis, Tracking and Statistics: Drupal can print browser-based reports with information about referrals, content popularity and generates an analytical report on how visitors navigate the website.

22. Logging and Reporting: The event log captures all important events, happenings to be reviewed by the administrators.

23. Web based Administration: Drupal requires no additional software to be installed and can be easily and conveniently administered using a web browser.

24. Community Forums: Powerful and dynamic forum features are in-built in Drupal to create great community websites.

25. Caching: Drupal’s caching mechanism reduces server bloating. The caching can be tuned in real time, while the user’s site is under load, but it has been successfully tested under a “slashdotting” and performed extremely well.
Mentioned below are the system requirements to run Drupal successfully:

1. A web Server that can execute PHP scripts. Drupal recommends Apache 1.3 or Apache 2.x hosted on Unices or Windows.
2. IIS (OPTIONAL): Drupal core will work using IIS5 or IIS6 if PHP is configured correctly. A third party solution is required to achieve clean URLs. Suggested use: IIS6.
3. PHP: Drupal 4.7 and above require PHP version 4.3.3 or higher. PHP 5.2 is a special case; only Drupal 4.7.5 (and greater) and 5.0 (and greater) run on PHP 5.2, older Drupal versions do not. The latest version of PHP 4.x. or 5.x is recommended for enhanced security and functionality.
4. PHP supported database server: Drupal recommends MySQL 4.1 or MySQL 5.0. Although Drupal will work on v3.23.17 and 4.0 but it is strongly suggested to use 4.1 or 5.0 for greater compatibility with Drupal 6 which may drop support for older versions of MySQL.
5. PostgreSQL, version 7.3 or newer.

Drupal 7 will soon be developed for PHP 5.2. This however would not apply to Drupal 6.

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