The Drupal content management system (CMS) is an open-source web hosting system. There is no criteria for possession of the software. Anybody can alter and edit it. Drupal is used by many organizations all over the world from education to government and even social media. When was Drupal released? What organizations use Drupal?

Drupal was released in January 2001 by Dries Buytaert. Continual improvements have been made on the initial product, resulting in the following versions:

Drupal 1 - released on January 15, 2001.
Drupal 2 - released on March 15, 2001.
Drupal 3 - released on August 15, 2001.
Drupal 4 - released on June 16, 2002.
Drupal 5 - released on January 15, 2007.
Drupal 6 - released on February 13, 2008.
Drupal 7 - released on January 5, 2011.
Drupal 8 (beta12) - June 29, 2015

Institutions that use Drupal to host their websites and blogs include Harvard, the White House, the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange), and Twitter.

Drupal is now used by over 1,000,000 customers. Drupal is not the only web hosting or content management system (CMS). There are others like WordPress, Joomla!, Textpattern, ExpressionEngine, Magento, Blogger, TYPO3 . . . The problem is deciding which system to use.

So, what makes Drupal a good choice?

• Themes: The ability to easily change the site look and feel and display different themes to different site sections or users.
• Modules: Extensive contributed projects to expand functionality.
• User Accounts: Multi-level authorizations to give users for content creation and editing.
• Menus: Different level menu framework allows multiple main menus, sub-menus, footer menus, and other unique menus.
• Site support: Different levels of administration capabilities.
• Pages: Add / alter content, pictures, and other media content (nodes).
• Blog: Provides full blogging capabilities 'out-of-box.'
• Contact Form: Provides the utilization of both individual and custom contact forms.
• Discussion: Provides full forum capabilities 'out-of-box.'
• Surveys: Provides the abilities to create polls and surveys on diverse subjects as various decision questions.
• Search: Provides, 'out-of-box' a smart search function that returns only results available for that user.
• Ownership Transfer: Allows users to transfer documents to other users.
• Reporting: Provides site statistics, error, logfile, and user activity reporting.
• Flexibility: A complete framework exists to add any desired enhancement in a safe and secure fashion.

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We think it's the best choice for businesses who want to spend their time running their business and not being forced into being part time coders to keep their website running.