Drupal is a free web software package that allows anyone to publish, manage and organize virtually any content on a website. Some applied uses of Drupal include the following:

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

The community behind Drupal is enormous with hundreds of add-on modules (plugins) to add extra functionality to your Drupal based website. It's as simple as downloading the module, extracting, enabling through your website and away you go! Some examples include:

• Document management
• Blogs
• Collaborative authoring environments
• Forums
• Peer-to-peer networking
• Newsletters
• Podcasting
• Picture galleries
• File uploads and downloads

Drupal is designed to support many different types of website. Many changes to a Drupal site's functionality, appearance, and modes of interaction are easy to make via Drupal's configuration and extension mechanisms.

Drupal is highly configurable. The administrator of a site can enable different capabilities and change many settings that affect the look and functionality of a site.

Drupal has a system of privileges that makes it possible to create different user roles - for instance, member, staff, partner. Each type of user can see and do different things on the site.

Drupal is designed to be easily extended through modules. A module is just a fancy term for additional software you can activate or "plug in" to your web site to provide extra features and functions.

• For example: You might activate the poll module to let users easily create web-based polls

Some modules, called "core" modules, come pre-packaged with every Drupal installation. Third party modules, called "contributed" modules, can be downloaded separately from the Drupal website and installed on your server.

The look and feel of a Drupal site can be changed through different website themes. As with modules, there are both core and contributed themes.

Drupal is completely free and open source software distributed under the GPLv2 (GNU Public License) and is actively maintained, developed and used by thousands of people.

There are a reported 250,000 known Drupal websites available on the Internet and likely double that amount on Intranet and Extranets.