Hi there! I'm Julia Kulla-Mader and I work at DesignHammer, a web design and development company. I got my start in Drupal about a year ago when I was trying to find a content management system for a client with a lot of requirements and not a lot of money. The job was too hard to custom program and Drupal ended up being the perfect solution. Since then I’ve become a bit obsessed with spreading the word about Drupal. From submitting patches to writing documentation to helping out in the support forums, over the past year I’ve become heavily involved in the community. A lot of these slides are borrowed from Angie Byron’s excellent Google Tech Talk, which can be found here: http://drupal.org/node/183754
First , it’s a content management system that allows anyone to create and maintain their own website . In this way, it is comparable to blogging platforms like Wordpress and Movable Type. Drupal is unique in that it is both a lightweight and powerful CMS. The core download is 2.9 MB compared with Wordpress' 4.2 MB download and Joomla's 21.9 MB download. Drupal is also unique in that there is an effort to separate content from presentation. As a result, you can plug Drupal into an XHTML template pretty easily.
Here’s an example of a edit page that is built with core parts of Drupal. The site I’m showing is a personal project called PickyRacer that is very much still in development. The goal is to create a place where its easy to find, rate and review, marathons and half-marathons. Here I am storing information about the Outer Banks marathon that can then be retrieved on other pages. - fields are developed using CCK module - show URL setting - show input format - show Google map integration
Second , it’s also a content management framework, with a robust. well-documented API The CMS acts as proof of concept for the framework.