When we talk about a CMS we actually refer to a WCMS. A Content Management System (CMS) is a computer application used to create, edit, manage, search and publish various kinds of digital media and electronic text.

A Website Content Management System (WCMS) is created to help users manage their websites in the easiest possible way. Users that don’t have the required HTML or programming knowledge can still update and maintain their website with ease. Although an experiences programmer/coder is required to set up the CMS it in essence a maintenance tool for the non technical user/s. But as with any application there is still a learning curve to be able to understand and use the application.

Most systems use a database to store the content, metadata and anything else that is used by the website and is managed by the CMS.

The look and feel of the CMS is determined by the template/theme that is applied to it. Templates are usually created by designers using images, HTML/XHTML and CSS. Most CMS’s offer free, premade templates/themes.

Here at TEIQ we use Drupal as our choice of a CMS, Drupal is a registered trademark of Dries Buytaert. “Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website.” Drupal.org

One of the many benefits of using Drupal is that it is maintained and developed by thousands of users and developers. The reason it’s beneficial to a user is that the community support behind it is massive and most problems/issues can be answered/solved just by googling or using the Drupal forum. Drupal encourages users to contribute to the Drupal project in any way possible. If you’re a developer you can contribute by helping maintain or create modules (add ons), if you’re a designer you can contribute by submitting themes and normal users can help by answering queries in the forum that they might know answers to. Note: developers and designers are also allowed to post :D

Drupal has many plug-ins/modules that can be used to enhance your Drupal installation to have the features that you want. Features like:

• Content management Systems
• Blogs
• Collaborative authoring environments
• Forums
• Peer-to-peer networking
• Newsletters
• Podcasting
• Picture gallaries
• File uploads and downloads

Drupal is a great application to use in your website creation, but you also have to think about how big your website is or what you need your website to achieve. If you are creating a website that is purely an information/brochure website, then there is no real need to use Drupal, although you can if you wish. If you are just going to have a blog, then WordPress would do a nice job. Even though Drupal is more than capable to create and manage a blog, it is probably too large to just have as a blogging tool, but we won’t go into the differences of different CMS’s and which ones are better for what... that’s a different topic altogether.

There are many high profile (and quite large) websites that use Drupal. MTV UK, Sony Music, Warner Brothers Records, Popular Science, AOL Corporate and Yahoo! Research just to name a few. As you can tell you can use Drupal for different kinds of websites.

• Community web portals
• Discussion sites
• Corporate web sites
• Intranet applications
• Aficionado sites
• E-commerce applications
• Resource directories
• Social Networking sites

Those are all the kinds of sites that you can achieve using Drupal.

In conclusions, Drupal is a very powerful, free and fairly easy to learn and use WCMS with a huge online community support.