More about Drupal

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual, a community of users, or an enterprise to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Hundreds of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power an endless variety of web sites, including

  • 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

Drupal is open-source software distributed under the GPL ("GNU General Public License") and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers. If you like what Drupal promises for you, please work with us to expand and refine Drupal to suit your specific needs.

Who is using Drupal?

There are quite a few well-known websites which are based on Drupal, here are a few:

  • AT & T
  • Mattel
  • Eric Clapton
  • Robbie Williams
  • BBC
  • Sony Ericcson
  • MTV
  • Warner Bros
  • Nokia
  • ...

See more Drupal-based websites at US & V.

System requirements

A minimum base installation requires at least 3MB of disk space but you should assume that your actual disk space will be somewhat higher. For example, if you install many contributed modules and contributed themes, the actual disk space for your installation could easily be 40 MB or more (exclusive of database content, media, backups and other files).

Web server

Drupal has been deployed successfully on both Apache and IIS.

Apache (Recommended)

  • Drupal will work on Apache 1.3 or Apache 2.x hosted on UNIX/Linux, OS X, or Windows. The majority of Drupal development and deployment is done on Apache, so there is more community experience and testing performed on Apache than on other web servers.
  • You can use the Apache 'mod_rewrite' extension to allow for clean URLs.

Microsoft IIS

  • Drupal core will work using IIS 5, IIS 6, or IIS 7 if PHP is configured correctly.
  • To achieve clean URLs you may need to use a third party product. For IIS7 you can use the Microsoft URL Rewrite Module or a third party solution.
  • When using Drupal on IIS 7 with fastcgi you must install Hotfix kb954946, or wait until the hotfix appears in a package update (recommended). KB954946 was included in Windows 2008 Server SP2

Drupal is being developed to be web server independent, but we have limited or no reports of successful use on web servers not listed here.

The total file size of your Drupal installation will depend on what you add to your site, but Drupal core files alone will take up approximately 2 to 3 MB uncompressed. The exact size depends on the version of Drupal you have installed.

Database server

Recommended: MySQL (or an equivalent such as MariaDB)
Drupal 6 supports MySQL 4.1 or higher.

PHP

Recommended: PHP 5.2.x

More information about the Drupal system requirements can be found on drupal.org.