Drupal was started by Belgium programmer Dries Buytaert in 2001, and today the award-winning project encompasses a thriving online community and many conferences and get-togethers in cities across the globe.



There is an extremely active development community that surrounds the project, with the company Lullabot being particularly keen to roll out audio and video guides for everyday use.

Based upon the Dutch word "dorp" (village), it is an open source project released under a GNU General Public License.

For those that haven't used the CMS yet (and as those that have will testify to), Drupal isn't easy to master. It takes some time to get to grips with much of the basic framework, and even then hardly any Drupal site is run without the assistance of one or more third-party modules.

When it comes to learning this CMS, the online Drupal guides are notoriously sparse. This isn't a problem that is exclusive to Drupal as most developers love writing code, but hate writing the accompanying documentation.

If you find that the information on their site is not detailed enough or difficult to navigate through then a good book to buy is Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6 by David Mercer (Packt Publishing). This book isn't necessarily cheap, but it is easy to read and will give you a good grounding in using Drupal.

A good source of advice when tackling this CMS is at their forum. You can almost guarantee that your query would have been asked before so use their search function and check from the thousands of old threads before you start a new one.

A big problem too with using Drupal is finding the right third-party module for the job. There are over 4,000 published modules, and although some are extremely well-written by coders with years of experience, others are perhaps not so hot and code perfect.

It takes a great deal of trial and error to find the addons that you know you can depend on.

Here are some essential Drupal modules that I use in every installation:

Token: Used by a number of different modules including CKK, Custom Breadcrumbs and Pathauto.

Pathauto: This creates user and search engine friendly URLs.

Cache Exclude: It allows you to exclude certain pages when you turn on your cache. It is essential to exclude the frontpage if you have a number of different users signing in and out.

Custom Breadcrumbs: Creates pretty, workable breadcrumbs for individual pages.

Meta tags: Adds description and keywords meta tags to pages.

XML sitemap: As the title suggests, this module creates an XML sitemap.

Content management filter: Enables greater control of nodes in the administration section.

Javascript Aggregator: Minifies the aggregated JavaScript file when Optimize JavaScript is enabled.

CAPTCHA: Essential install in order to stop being overrun by spam.

PNG Behave: A great module if you are using 24 or 32 bit PNG image files and would like them to render properly in IE6.

Views / CKK / Panels / Contemplate: These are all essential modules if you really want to get to grips with Drupal as they allow you to make drastic modifications to Drupal core and themes without knowledge of PHP.

The biggest problem with Drupal at the time of writing is its bad usability, both in the administration section of every install and on the main site at drupal.org

This will be fixed over the coming year as a great deal of time has been put in by the Mark Boulton Design agency in fixing the myriad of usability problems as highlighted by studies carried out by the University of Minnesota and the University of Baltimore.

If you are not on the Drupal train then jump on board today as this Content Management System is going places!