Categories: CMS & E-CommerceWeb DevelopmentTutorials

What is Drupal?

2 min read

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

Currently Drupal is being used as a CMS in below listed domains

Arts
Banking and Financial
Beauty and Fashion
Blogging
Community
E-Commerce
Education
Entertainment
Government
Health Care
Legal Industry
Manufacturing and Energy
Media
Music
Non-Profit
Publishing
Social Networking
Small business

Diversity that is being offered by Drupal is the reason of its growing popularity.

Drupal is written in PHP.PHP is open source server side scripting language and it has changed the technological landscape to great extent.

The Economist, Examiner.com and The White house websites have been developed in Drupal.

System requirements

Disk space

A minimum installation requires 15 Megabytes. 60 MB is needed for a website with many contributed modules and themes installed. Keep in mind you need much more for the database, files uploaded by the users, media, backups and other files.

Web server

Apache, Nginx, or Microsoft IIS.

Database

Drupal 6: MySQL 4.1 or higher, PostgreSQL 7.1, Drupal 7: MySQL 5.0.15 or higher with PDO, PostgreSQL 8.3 or higher with PDO, SQLite 3.3.7 or higher

Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle are supported by additional modules.

PHP

Drupal 6: PHP 4.4.0 or higher (5.2 recommended).

Drupal 7: PHP 5.2.5 or higher (5.3 recommended).

Drupal 8: PHP 5.3.10 or higher.

How to create multiple websites using Drupal

Multi-site allows you to share a single Drupal installation (including core code, contributed modules, and themes) among several sites

One of the greatest features of Drupal is Multi-site feature. Using this feature a single Drupal installation can be used for various websites.

Multisite feature is helpful in managing code during the code upgradation.Each site will have will have its own content, settings, enabled modules, and enabled theme.

When to use multisite feature?

If the sites are similar in functionallity (use same modules or use the same drupal distribution) you should use multisite feature.
If the functionality is different don’t use multisite.

To create a new site using a shared Drupal code base you must complete the following steps:

Create a new database for the site (if there is already an existing database you can also use this by defining a prefix in the installation procedure).
Create a new subdirectory of the ‘sites’ directory with the name of your new site (see below for information on how to name the subdirectory).
Copy the file sites/default/default.settings.php into the subdirectory you created in the previous step. Rename the new file to settings.php.
Adjust the permissions of the new site directory.
Make symbolic links if you are using a subdirectory such as packtpub.com/subdir and not a subdomain such as subd.example.com.
In a Web browser, navigate to the URL of the new site and continue with the standard Drupal installation procedure.