Drupal 6 review

Drupal 6 is a world class, award-winning CMS (Content Management System). It is free to use, modify and distribute, as it is Open Source software, licensed under the GPL (General Public License). Drupal is perhaps one of the most powerful and extensible CMS systems, capable of powering everything from small personal blogs to large, high traffic community websites.

Common uses

Drupal is very flexible and can be made to work in almost any situation with a little effort. Some of its most common uses today are personal blogs, corporate websites and community sites.

Installation

Installation is a breeze for anybody slightly technically minded, and shouldn't be to much of a challenge for everybody else. It basically consists of downloading the software, placing it on your web server, altering some file permissions, creating a database, running an installation script and setting up a cron task. This list might sound daunting - but there is a wizard to guide you through most of it and there are detailed and well written instructions on the Drupal website for the rest. It is easier than it sounds!

Getting started

The administration interface can be a little overwhelming at first, as it's basically a huge list of links, each link taking you deeper into the administration system. However, after a few hours of poking around you will become more and more familiar with the way Drupal likes to organize things, allowing you to easily change the settings you need to. So, you can stop worrying about administration and focus on creating some killer content!

Features

Out of the box, Drupal comes packed full of useful features including a bloging facility, forums, user comments, locale support, rss publishing, search facility and more, as well as being search engine friendly. Visit the Drupal site for a full list of bundled modules.

Extensibility

For anything that is not covered by the 33 core modules, there is a huge library of third party modules to choose from. You can find everything from content rating systems to full blown ecommerce solutions. New modules are being added all the time, but if you can't find exactly what you're looking for and are happy to dive into PHP code, creating a custom module is always an option too. As well the huge module library, there is also an ever growing theme repository with enough themes to reskin your website every day for 3 months!

Security

As with most of the popular CMS systems, Drupal has had it's share of security problems over the years. With the release of Drupal 6, came a full security audit and whilst a few problems were identified, these have been addressed in the latest 6.3 release. Drupal has it's own security team who strive to ensure that Drupal is as secure as it can be, and who address new problems as and when they arise.

Strengths and weaknesses

Summary

Drupal 6 is a very powerful, flexible, and extensible CMS system capable of delivering websites of the highest quality. Whilst it's steep learning curve can pose a problem for new users or users moving over from simpler CMS systems such as Wordpress, those who have taken the leap have found it to be worth their while. With it's ever growing user-base, Drupal 6 will continue to grow and flourish over the coming years.