Drupal Web page management system Jonathan Millis Educational Design Resources NTID at RIT

History of Drupal The name Drupal, pronounced "droo-puhl," derives from the English pronunciation of the Dutch word "druppel," which means "drop“ (as in drag and drop.) Created in 2000 2001 - Drupal became open source Free download Usage Statistics http://drupal.org/project/usage/drupal

RIT adopts Drupal 2010 – RIT chooses Drupal as the web content management system campus wide Other web content systems Joomla http://www.topnotchthemes.com/blog/090224/drupal-vs-joomla-frank-comparison-ibm-consultant WordPress http://www.goodwebpractices.com/other/wordpress-vs-joomla-vs-drupal.html RedDot

Why Drupal? Advanced URL Control — Unlike WordPress, Drupal gives you precise control over URL structure. Each item of content in Drupal (called a node) can be given a custom URL (called a URL alias). In WordPress you are generally limited to one type of permalink URL for all posts. Custom Content Types and Views — You can use the Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views Modules to create new content types and create advanced custom views for them without writing any code. A few examples of "content types" are "blog posts", "news stories", "forum posts", "tutorials", "classified ads", "podcasts". You can create as many custom content types as you would like and display them in many different ways. Most content management systems would require writing code to accomplish these tasks, but there is no programming knowledge required to do them in Drupal. Revision Control — You can configure Drupal to save a new version of your pages every time they are editing. That means that you can go back to view or revert old revisions if you want.

Why Drupal? (continued) User Management — Drupal was designed for community-based Web sites and has strong user role and access control functionality. You can create as many custom user roles with custom access levels as you need. For example you could create the following roles, each with different levels of access to your features: "anonymous visitor", "authenticated user", "moderator", editor", "webmaster", "admin". Page Titles and Meta Tags — Drupal's Page Title Module gives you custom control of your HTML <title> elements, while the Meta Tags Module gives you control over your pages' individual meta description tags. This is difficult in some content management systems, but it's easy with Drupal. Excellent Documentation — Documentation includes the official handbooks, the massive API Reference, numerous tutorials, blogs, videos, and podcasts, and the excellent new book Pro Drupal Development. There is even a Drupal Dojo community where you can learn how to become a Drupal ninja.

Why Drupal? (continued) PHP Template — Drupal uses the PHP Template theme engine by default. Theming in Drupal is easier than theming in WordPress and doesn't necessarily require any PHP knowledge. Drupal Cookbooks — If you want a feature that is not built into Drupal by default, chances are that someone has already written a code snippet for it and posted it in the code snippets section of Drupal.org. Large and Friendly Community — With so many major sites using Drupal, it's not going away soon. For an idea of the size of the developer community, take a look at the long list of community- contributed modules.

Who is using Drupal? www.whitehouse.gov www.grammy.com/ www.economist.com/ www.motherjones.com/ library.rit.edu

Is Drupal for you? Easy to manage, update, edit… You don’t need to know how to program. Update is instant.

Themes Thousands to choose from: http://drupal.org/project/Themes http://themegarden.org/

Examples of NTID Drupal sites http://www.rit.edu/ntid/edr/projects/portfolio/websites

How to Request a Drupal site At NTID: http://www.rit.edu/ntid/edr/services/website