Drupal

Drupal powers everything from personal blogs to government sites, including whitehouse.gov and data.gov.uk. Version 7 features a new easier-to-use and more intuitive administrative interface that allows to update modules and themes directly from within the console. A new database abstraction layer offers substantially enhanced performance and scalability options.

The blogging and social community platform written in PHP became an open source project in 2001. Over time, optional modules were added to Drupal core, a modular system of hooks and callbacks, and administrators have the option to extend the functionality of the CMS by enabling them. Advanced searches, blogs, comments, forums, and polls are included in Drupal core. Drupal offers multi-site and OpenID support, and access control restrictions can be configured.

Drupal core includes themes that allow users to customize the "look and feel" of Drupal sites. The open source CMS can automatically notify the administrator when new versions of a module, theme, or the core become available. The design allows third-party developers to extend functionality by adding API’s while core files remain isolated. One example is the field API that allows administrators to add custom data fields not only to content but also to users, comments, and taxonomies. Almost 7,500 free modules and over 900 themes are currently listed on the Drupal website.

Caching has been improved in version 7, and JavaScript and CSS handling have been optimized. The CMS now offers semantic web support with RDFa, and image handling is supported "out of the box." Drupal is available as a free download here.