Drupal is one of the best Content Management Systems (CMS). It is written in PHP and requires a MySQL database. Its basic installation can be easily turned into many different types of web sites - from simple web logs to large online communities.
Drupal is open source. You can freely and easy to install Drupal.
Easy way to customize source code to fit your requirements;
No programming knowledge needed! you can learn the basics of Drupal from this blog.
Lots of popular modules & features including Search Engine Friendly URLs(SEF), categories, search function and forum, blog, wiki and many other types of web sites;
Lot of community and developers are there to help you and to solve the problems
Drupal Archistructure
Some of the basic section described below,
Node / Entities
A node in Drupal is the generic term for a piece of content on your web site.
Some examples of nodes:
Pages in books
Discussion topics in forums
Entries in blogs
News article stories
Each node on your site has a Content Type. It also has fields such as Node ID, a Title, a descriptions, a creation date, an author (a user on the site), a Body (which may be ignored/omitted for some content types), and some other properties. By using modules such as the contributed Content Construction Kit (CCK) module, the core Taxonomy module, and the contributed Location module, you can add fields and other properties to your nodes.
In Drupal 7 nodes are still used, but the idea of nodes is expanded and named Entities. Entities can include not only nodes but users, comments, relationships between nodes etc. All entities can have extra information associated with them (fields) just as nodes do when using the Content Construction Kit.
Module
A module is software (code) that extends Drupal features and/or functionality. Drupal have 3 kind of modules
Core modules are those included with the main download of Drupal, and you can turn on their functionality without installing additional software.
Contributed modules are downloaded from the Modules download section of drupal.org, and installed within your Drupal installation.
Custom Module , you can also create your own modules; this requires a thorough understanding of Drupal structure, PHP programming.
Region, Block, Menu
Pages on your Drupal site are laid out in regions, which can include the header, footer, sidebars, and main content section; your theme may define additional regions. Blocks are discrete chunks of information that are displayed in the regions of your site's pages. Blocks can take the form of menus (which are concerned with site navigation), the output from modules (e.g., hot forum topics), or dynamic and static chunks of information that you've created yourself (e.g., a list of upcoming events).
There are three standard menus in Drupal: Primary Links, Secondary Links, and Navigation. Primary and Secondary links are built by site administrators, and displayed automatically in the page header of many themes (if not, you can enable their blocks to display them). Navigation is the catch-all menu that contains your administration menus, as well as links supplied by modules on your site. You can also create your own custom menus, and display them by enabling their blocks.
You can customize menus in several ways, such as reordering menu items by setting their “weight” or simply dragging into place, renaming menu items, and changing the link title (the tooltip that appears when you mouse over a menu item). You can move a menu item into a different menu by editing the Parent property of the menu item.
You can also add custom menu items to a menu, from the Add menu item tab of the Menu administration screen. To create a menu item, you will need to provide the path to the content (see above).
In all cases a menu item will only be shown to a visitor if they have the rights to view the page it links to; e.g., the admin menu item is not shown to visitors who are not logged in.
User, Permission, Role
Each user / anonymous users has a numeric user ID, and non-anonymous users also have a user name and an email address. Other information can also be associated with users by modules; for instance,
Anonymous users have a user ID of zero (0). The user with user ID one (1), which is the user account you create when you install Drupal, is special: that user has permission to do absolutely everything on the site.
Other users on your site can be assigned permissions via roles. To do this, you first need to create a role, which you might call "Content editor" or "Member". Next, you will assign permissions to that role, to tell Drupal what that role can and can't do on the site. Finally, you will grant certain users on your site your new role, which will mean that when those users are logged in, Drupal will let them do the actions you gave that role permission to do.
Theme
The theme controls how your site is displayed, including the graphic look, layout, and colors. A theme consists of one or more PHP files that define the HTML output of your site's pages, along with one or more CSS files that define the layout, fonts, colors, and other styles.
Database
Drupal stores information in a database; each type of information has its own database table. For instance, the basic information about the nodes of your site are stored in the Node table, and if you use the CCK module to add fields to your nodes, the field information is stored in separate tables. Comments and Users also have their own database tables, and roles, permissions, and other settings are also stored in database tables.
You can also assign permissions for the special built-in roles of "anonymous user" (a user who is not logged in) and "authenticated user" (a user who is logged in, with no special role assignments). Drupal permissions are quite flexible -- you are allowed to assign permission for any task to any role, depending on the needs of your site.
Latest Version : drupal 8.x
Official Site : http://www.drupal.org
Community Site : http://www.groups.drupal.org
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