Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website.

Features:

General features :
• Collaborative Book – Our unique collaborative book feature lets you setup a “book” and then authorize other individuals to contribute content.
• Friendly URLs – Drupal uses Apache’s mod_rewrite to enable customizable URLs that are both user and search engine friendly.
• Modules – The Drupal community has contributed many modules which provide functionality that extend Drupal core.
• Online help – Like many Open Source projects, we can’t say that our online help is perfect but have built a robut online help system built into the core help text. Available to you on your own site.
• Open source – The source code of Drupal is freely available under the terms of the GNU General Public License 2 (GPL). Unlike proprietary blogging or content management systems, Drupal’s feature set is fully available to extend or customize as needed.
• Personalization – A robust personalization environment is at the core of Drupal. Both the content and the presentation can be individualized based on user-defined preferences.
• Role based permission system – Drupal administrators don’t have to tediously setup permissions for each user. Instead, they assign permissions to roles and then group like users into a role group.
• Searching – All content in Drupal is fully indexed and searchable at all times if you take advantage of the built in search module.
• Podcasting
• Picture galleries
• File uploads and downloads

Content management :

• Polls – Drupal comes with a poll module which enables admins and/or users to create polls and show them on various pages.
• Templating – Drupal’s theme system separates content from presentation allowing you to control the look and feel of your Drupal site. Templates are created from standard HTML and PHP coding meaning that you don’t have to learn a proprietary templating language.
• Threaded comments – Drupal provides a powerful threaded comment model for enabling discussion on published content. Comments are hierarchical as in a newsgroup or forum.
• Version control – Drupal’s version control system tracks the details of content updates including who changed it, what was changed, the date and time of changes made to our content and more. Version control features provide an option to keep a comment log and enables you to roll-back content to an earlier version.

Blogging :

• Blogger API support – The Blogger API allows your Drupal site to be updated by many different tools. This includes non-web browser based tools that provide a richer editing environment.
• Content syndication – Drupal exports your site’s content in RDF/RSS format for others to gather. This lets anyone with a News Aggregator browse your Drupal sites feeds.
• News aggregator – Drupal has a powerful built-in News Aggregator for reading and blogging news from other sites. The News Aggregator caches articles to your MySQL database and its caching time is user configurable.
• Permalinks – All content created in Drupal has a permanent link or “perma link” associated with it so people can link to it freely without fear of broken links.

Administration and analysis :

• Analysis, Tracking and Statistics – Drupal can print browser-based reports with information about referrals, content popularity and how visitors navigate your site.screenshot .
• Logging and Reporting – All important activities and system events are captured in an event log to be reviewed by an administrator at a later time.
• Web based administration – Drupal can be administered entirely using a web browser, making it possible to access it from around the world and requires no additional software to be installed on your computer.
• Discussion forums – Full discussion forum features are built into Drupal to create lively, dynamic community sites.
• Caching – The caching mechanism eliminates database queries increasing performance and reducing the server’s load.

Drupal is for:

• 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