Drupal Review

Drupal is an open source content management platform that actually has modules that make it a social networking platform as well. 

Drupal is actually somewhat limited in terms of social networking features, but for developers who are looking for a free, simple, and easy platform to establish an online community, Drupal certainly fits the bill.

Drupal's mission statement makes it clear that the intent of the Drupal project is that "Drupal supports and enhances the potential of the Internet as a medium where diverse and geographically-separated individuals and groups can collectively produce, discuss, and share information and ideas."   Essentially - Drupal's mission statement defines exactly what social networking websites are all about.

Drupal Social Networking Platform

When I first came across Drupal I was a little put off by the website.  Drupal.org is far from commercialized - the website is extremely simple and dedicated to simply outlining the latest updates to the source code.  The main site provides basic information about the open source software such as features, screenshots and a demo, and a quick link to download the core software.  Typically open source scripts like this are famous for being full of bugs and issues - however that does not appear to be the case with Drupal.  From our quick review of this software, Drupal actually appears to be a very light weight, and therefore flexible system that is very well written.  It is classified as a content management system but it has features and capability to serve as a social networking platform.

Requirements

Most web applications such as these scripts that need to be installed on your web server have a minimum set of requirements for your hosting service.  In the case of Drupal, the minimum requirements are as follows:

1. PHP compatible
2. Must support MySQL/PostgreSQL
3. Will run on standard web space

As shown by this list, the requirements are not very stringent, and this application will run on just about any web space that supports PHP and has a MySQL database available.

Major Features

The design of this system is actually very flexible and modular.  Drupal is especially useful for professional programmers or developers who understand how to customize the code to suit their specific needs.  The templates, layout, and everything else about a Drupal site are extremely easy to do for programmers who know PHP.

Drupal originated as a community site building tool - so most of its features are based on this, making it an excellent choice as a social networking platform.

The standard features that are initially installed with Drupal include:

•-          Standard HTML editing and publishing

•-          Content management tools

•-          RSS feeds

•-          Blogs and blog API

•-          Automatic content archival

•-          Online books or E-book publication

•-          Comments (users can append comments)

•-          Discussion forums

•-          Newsletters

•-          Podcasting

•-          Picture Galleries

•-          Polls where system calculates results from responses.

•-          Logging of events and errors.

•-          Cached content for better performance.

•-          Built in search engine (somewhat unreliable)

Most of the standard tools listed above are realistically more than enough to establish a decent social network website.  However for developers who want a bit more functionality on their site, Drupal also offers additional modules that can be downloaded and installed onto an existing Drupal site.  Installation of modules is a simple matter of copying folders into the modules folder of the Drupal install, and sometimes some minor database change must be made through a script.  But in general, module installs are extremely simple and easy.

Modules that Drupal offers as add-ons include:

•-          PDFView, which is a utility to convert content into PDF format.

•-          Typecat, a utility that displays content by category.

•-          Filestore, a utility for uploading files

•-          Spam, a features that will detect spam content or comments

•-          HTMLArea, a utility that provides WYSIWYG content editing

•-          Add an Atom feed URL

•-          Webform, a utility that creates interactive forms for the developer.

Keep in mind that while the core Drupal code is pretty well debugged, many add-on modules won't be, so keep your guard up.  The good news is that the core code is well laid out and easy to understand, so for PHP programmers, customizing their own website will be a fairly easy endeavor.

Performance

B ecause the code is so clean and the software is simple and efficient, our test run of Drupal consisted of doing a test run of a social network platform that appeared to outperform every other platform we've tested so far in terms of response time and speed.  However if I had to guess I would estimate that this particular platform might not handle as well under a heavy load, with users using multiple features of the system simultaneously.  However we did not notice any bugs in the software during the trial run, and we even tested an install of several modules - all of them were extremely simple and fast to install, and the ones we tested worked as expected after install.

It is important to keep in mind that if a free open-source social networking platform such as Drupal is selected as the base for your website, while the cost is free and the system is fairly simple to use, should you come across any significant problems or have certain issues you don't understand - finding any form of customer service will be virtually impossible.  However, you might be successful in finding online forums where other users are discussing the same issues that you may be having.

Overview

All versions of the software are available for free download from the drupal.org website.  Versions 5.7 and 6.2 from early 2008 are available for immediate free download.  Additionally version 7.x is in development, and a download of the development snapshot is available for developers to have a look at the source code.

Drupal is popular among the Linux crowd for the open-source mission and for the simplicity of the software.  It is highly recommended that anyone choosing to use Drupal understands or learns PHP.  The real power behind Drupal isn't so much what features are available - although the features are plentiful.  The strength of this platform is its open availability to be completely customized by web site developers who want to turn the platform into a seamless integrated social networking platform for their website.