Being an open-source platform, Drupal has evolved from a single server to multiple contributors today. Over 20 services and sub-sites make up the Drupal ecosystem and power the Drupal community.
Drupal has acquired several sites and services throughout its development to support its growing functionality plug-ins and documentation process, such as Dreditor and Drupal Ladder.
In this article, we’ll list some of the tools that make up the entirety of the Drupal ecosystem and how they work to serve the overall function of Drupal as a platform.
Symfony Foundation
The Drupal platform is tied to Symfony, PHP-programmed reusable components and framework. Essentially, this platform is where Drupal is built upon. Because of this interconnectedness of the two platforms, major changes in Symfony will affect Drupal. For instance, back in November 2021, Drupal had to end the support for Drupal 8 because Symfony was also moving to Symfony 4.
Drupalcode.org
It’s important to know the basic things you can do within Drupal as a user, so it’s best to start with a resource page that gives you the information you need to understand the Drupal ecosystem.
Drupalcode.org is a digital repository site where anything following the development of Drupal-related content is documented. It is built on GitLab. This repository is also where all the changes of Drupal are stored, including the previous iterations of the platform and how the usage of each tool is documented to work on third-party platforms.
The security advisory page of this repository also includes the RSS page that allows users to subscribe and start receiving announcement emails.
Modules
Drupal employs a modular approach to its services, which means the users only need to integrate and activate the modules they need for their project, essentially eliminating all the unnecessary features that are not needed. This approach is convenient since adding unnecessary buttons and features to your website will likely overload the administration interfaces. Subsequently, avoiding unnecessary features speeds up creating and managing of content.
The modules referred to here are the basic features, such as adding a comment section below an article entry. These features are fairly common in most CMS, but some modules are more specific and complex that you can add to your website via Drupal, such as page rendering.
Distributions
While modules are there for users to add new individual features to their websites, such as a comment section for a blog entry or basic contact information of the company or author of the article, distributions are bundles that tie together modules in a templated manner to serve specific types of websites.
For instance, when a user wants to grasp what an eCommerce website should look like, they can look up different distributions to see which of the following has the modules they need for the type of business. An example is Commerce Kickstart, which features all the needed modules to create a basic eCommerce store. There is also Open Social, which offers modules needed to create a social community and intranets.
Instead of manually adding the modules yourself and copying other websites built on Drupal, you can rapidly start your project with distributions. With that said, users like eCommerce will have to carefully evaluate what distribution they decide to use for their project as early as the pre-sales stage of the business. This is because while distributions offer the developer or content manager an opportunity to jumpstart the content publishing process, changing specific modules within the distribution can prove difficult since it’s built on the traditional Drupal framework.
Communities
As mentioned earlier, Drupal is an open-source platform, so its support is entirely up to the community that contributes to its development. This means that no single entity oversees the development and decides which should be added as features and all the other major and minor changes.
Drupal Ladder, for instance, contains the step-by-step process on how to contribute to Drupals’ development yourself. SimplyTest.me, on the other hand, gives you the opportunity to find and preview the modules that you need for your page. This opportunity not only gives you an insight into how the final project will look to your visitors based on the preview, but it will also give you a chance to test if the module is working properly or if there is something to change to the website.
More importantly, DrupalCamps are currently active, with people from different regions all over the world coming together to share their ideas about the innovation of the core functionalities of Drupal. For instance, Bay Area Drupal Camp (BADCamp) is one of the biggest camps in San Francisco.
Conclusion
Content management systems are a growing industry that supports digital marketers and developers. The evolution of Drupal is largely thanks to the support of hundreds and thousands of people from all over the world who contribute to the platform.
While many CMSs are just as robust and complete as Drupal, Drupal’s flexibility is the main thing that makes it unique. The modular approach to its core functionality remains one of its biggest strengths; however, it needs more work than other CMSs with a set of functional features. The modular approach means that larger projects such as sites created to store a lot of information and designed to last and be maintained for a long time are more apt to use Drupal as their CMS.