Drupal is an open-source Content Management System (CMS), which can be used to create powerful, flexible websites that are easily configured and edited by the end users, who don't even need to know how to use HTML to harness its power. Using contributed modules to provide specialized functionality, you can use Drupal to create nearly any site that can be envisioned. Being scalable, it can be used to power anything from a community portal to a corporate network.
Drupal is the framework of choice for tens of thousands of developers and companies that build their sites based on Drupal. Drupal has been consistently rated among the top CMSs for several years.
Released as an open-source project in 2001 by its original creator, Dries Buytaert (http://buytaert.net/), it quickly attracted a strong community of developers and programmers. By now it is a mature and stable product that continues to evolve. With the release of Drupal 6 earlier this year, it remains a cutting-edge choice for website development.
Drupal is a database-driven dynamic web application built on PHP. As PHP is offered by most web hosts, as are MySQL and PostgreSQL, the database management systems supported by Drupal can be deployed from most server environments.
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PHP is a reflective programming language, which means that a Drupal script can observe and modify itself at runtime, allowing advanced features such as custom dynamic blocks and its template theming system.
Also, Drupal encapsulates the database in an abstract layer so that the contributed modules may access data stored on the server without knowing the implementation procedure. This allows a site to be deployed from any of the wide array of servers, using MySQL or PostgreSQL, Apache or IIS, Linux or Windows, and many other options.
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Drupal has sometimes been criticized as not following Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), largely because it doesn't make much use of PHP's object classes, which is far from true. In reality, Drupal standards implement OOP in an advanced and efficient way (see http://api.drupal.org/api/file/developer/topics/oop.html/6 for more discussion on this topic). Additionally, PHP 5 offers better OOP support and as Drupal moves to the requirement of this version of PHP, module maintainers will take more advantage of it.
The end result is that a site built with Drupal can be expanded and enhanced, using plug-in contributed modules and custom themes to create a powerful and unique site. It is specifically these two facets (contributed modules and custom theming) that will be explored in detail throughout this book, obviously with an eye towards multimedia.
Because of the limited space and the availability of excellent resources, this book assumes you have some basic experience of using Drupal, and that you already know how to install it on a server. In fact, to get the most out of this book, you probably want to have a test installation to test some of the techniques and ideas presented here. Besides visiting Drupal.org, you can also find more help in the Resources Appendix of this book.
The Internet has literally exploded with multimedia over the past few years. We will specifically study images, audio, and video in this book, with some additional discussion of interactive media such as FLASH.
Drupal is well-suited to handling multimedia with its modular structure. However, at first glance on installation, this may not seem to be true. This is by design. The core of Drupal is meant to be fast, light, and scalable. It needs functionalities such as asset management and multimedia display that are provided by contributed modules, which must be added onto its core by developers and administrators. Finally, theme developers (or Themers, as these people are commonly referred to in the world of Drupal) take the resultant display and change it to meet the specifications for the site, matching content to compositions.
Due to the dichotomy between the light feel of Drupal core and the overwhelming dread of scouring through hundreds of contributed modules, the need has arisen for a book such as this, which will demonstrate how best to create a site that harnesses the power available for multimedia handling. But firstly, we need to understand the basics offered by the Drupal core and a few essential modules.