How Is Drupal Built?
The Drupal framework represents a content management service, or CMS, used to present Web pages for such entities as news outlets and bloggers. CMS frameworks are set up to store, retrieve and display information, often in a collaborative setting with multiple users writing and modifying data. As such, Drupal was built as a framework that integrates with a software stack involving servers, PHP and SQL databases.
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Drupal
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Drupal represents the end result of a project begun by Dries Buytaert, a Belgian college student at the time, to facilitate communication with his friends. The original Drupal, called Drop, was intended to be a message board on which Buytaert and his friends could collaborate. as technology on the Internet moved toward Web journaling and blogs, however, the framework of Drop was modified to include commenting, ranking, and syndication, and it finally grew to become the Drupal framework.
Drupal Framework
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Drupal is not a "program" in the traditional sense, but rather a "framework." Frameworks are systems of code, written in a particular language, used to enable programmers to deploy websites quickly and with a certain standardization in mind. The Drupal Framework accomplishes this, and more: Drupal offers a fully functional CMS suite that users can install on an existing server stack. The CMS suite comes with a graphical user interface, or GUI, that users can access with a Web browser. This means users can create, modify and upload content without knowing how to code.
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Server Software
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The Drupal framework cannot function without an underlying server. The server handles user requests, manages programming language plugins and operates connections to the SQL database. On Linux systems, the Drupal framework rests on top of an Apache server. Microsoft Windows users can host a Drupal site with Microsoft IIS.
Database and Programming
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Underlying the implementation of Drupal is data residing in an SQL database. Above the data reside the basic implementation of the framework coded in PHP. This code sets the structure for the framework and, with basic programming, blocks and menus are created. Blocks are sections of a website that the PHP code can generate from the data, and menus are selection items also built from the data. Above that, user permissions are determined so as to define which users have access to which data. Finally, templates are created that implement blocks, menus and permissions, and that offer users selections as to how a website is set up.
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