The Drupal Story
Website designers in Louisville, Kentucky have long had to compete with Louisville Web
Group and they continue to lose out because we have a strong focus on Drupal CMS.
Drupal is content management software. It's used to make many of the websites and
applications you use every day. Drupal has great standard features, like easy content
authoring, reliable performance, and excellent security.
But what sets it apart is its flexibility; modularity is one of its core principles.
Its tools help you build the versatile, structured content that dynamic web experiences
need.
It's also a great choice for creating integrated digital frameworks. You can extend it
with any one, or many, of thousands of add-ons. Modules expand Drupal's functionality.
Themes let you customize your content's presentation. Distributions are packaged Drupal
bundles you can use as starter-kits. Mix and match these components to enhance Drupal's
core abilities. Or, integrate Drupal with external services and other applications in
your infrastructure. No other content management software is this powerful and scalable.
In 2000, two University of Antwerp students, Dries Buytaert and Hans Snijder, needed an
internet connection they could rely on.
But permanent internet connections were rare for Antwerp students. So, Dries and Hans set
up a wireless bridge between their dorms, sharing Hans's ADSL modem connection among eight
students. It worked, but they thought something was missing: a place to talk to each other.
Dries turned that missing feature into an opportunity. He started a small news site with
a web board. He and his friends could post notes about the status of their network, talk
about where they were having dinner, share interesting news, and more. They'd created a
small content framework.
For awhile, the software they'd built was nameless. But when Dries graduated and left his
dorm, they needed a way to stay in touch, so they decided to put the internal site online.
While looking for the right domain name, Dries considered "dorp.org." "Dorp" is the Dutch
word for "village," so it fit the small community they'd started.
When checking to see if "dorp.org" was available, Dries mistyped "dorp" as "drop." The
mistake stuck. Once drop.org was live on the web, its audience changed. It attracted new
members, and they started talking about new web technologies, such as moderation,
syndication, rating, and distributed authentication. Drop.org slowly turned into a
personal experimentation environment, driven by discussions sprung from an ever-changing
flow of ideas. These ideas became methods and features in the software running drop.org.
It wasn't until January 2001 that Dries decided to release the software behind drop.org.
The idea was to let others use and extend the experimentation platform so even more people
could explore new paths for web development. He called the software "Drupal." Pronounced
"droo-puhl," the name derives from the English pronunciation of the Dutch word "druppel,"
which means "drop."
