Drupal is a content management framework, and it's used to make many of the websites and applications you use every day. Drupal has great standard features, easy content authoring, reliable performance and excellent security. What sets Drupal apart is its flexibility; modularity is one of its core principles. Its tools help you build the versatile, structured content that ambitious web experiences need. With Drupal, you can build almost any integrated experience you can imagine.

Yesterday's Keynote from Drupal project founder, Dries Buytaert, kicked off the annual North American gathering of Drupalists from around the world, and also kicked off a new Drupal community initiative aimed at promoting the Drupal platform through a coordinated marketing effort using funds raised within the community.

DrupalCon is underway in New Orleans, Louisiana, and it kicked off with the always energetic keynote from Drupal project founder, Dries Buytaert.

Drupal is a very widely used open-source content management system. It initially was released in 2001, and recent statistics show Drupal as the third-most popular content management system, with just less than 800,000 Web sites utilizing Drupal as a content management system.

In the early 1990s, my first job out of college was as a software engineer at a startup company. We were building a commercial product using a well-known open-source network security project. In those days, Agile software development practices (not to mention the World Wide Web, or even widespread public awareness of the Internet) still were in the future.

Everyone planning and building Web solutions with Drupal benefits from understanding what a "hook" is—and why Drupal is not a CMS.

Do you find yourself repeating the same steps whenever you start a new Drupal project? Do you always download and enable the same modules, and make the same configuration changes every time? As we start doing more and more Drupal projects at Nomensa, I noticed that we were doing exactly this, so I started to look into ways to streamline our initial project setup process.

One of the great new things about Drupal 7 is that it's now easier to customize your site content. In Drupal 6, you typically had to use the CCK (Content Construction Kit) module for fine-grained control in customizing content, but that has been folded into core for Drupal 7. Drupal 7 is now a true content management framework (CMF).

Editor's note: Drupal Commerce Kickstart 2.0 was released yesterday after much testing and perfecting, and the artic

As Linux Journal's resident Drupal nerd, I could not be more pleased to bring you this special Drupal issue. Drupal really is everywhere these days, and it's available in more "flavors" than most people in the Open Source community are aware of.

Drupal is one of the most popular and versatile platforms for Web design. It's free, open source and will run on Linux. Early last year, a new version was released (Drupal 7), making it even better with improvements in usability, performance and security. If you've looked at Drupal before, but didn't end up using it, you may want to take another look.

Are you a Drupal developer anxious to share your knowledge with Linux Journal's audience?  We're currently accepting article proposals for an upcoming special Drupal issue, and we'd love to see your ideas.

Many of you know what a huge Drupal fan I am, and while I am a bit heartbroken that I will not attend the upcoming DrupalCon London, happening August 22-26 in Croydon, I'd like to give the rest of you the skinny on DrupalCon so you can all go have fun without me.  To that end, I got a few tidbits from Robert Castelo, one of DrupalCon's organizers.

 As you may have heard, Drupal's biggest annual event starts next week.  This year's North American DrupalCon will draw an expected crowd over over 3000 attendees, and offer something for a wide variety of Drupalers and future Drupalers, as well as web developers and designers in general.

The long-awaited new version of the popular web content management system and platform was released today. It represents the hard work of almost 1000 developers (by Greg Knaddison's count) and countless other Drupal community members contributing their time and effort to testing and providing feedback.

I had the pleasure of joining a video conference with our local Drupal expert, Katherine Druckman, and Barry Jaspan, one of the system architects from Acquia. Acquia is a company that specializes in Drupal. While their company does many things for clients interested in using Drupal, we were specifically talking about cloud computing.

You may have noticed something different about LinuxJournal.com today. I am very pleased to share our newly redesigned site with you, and I'd like to tell you a little bit about some of the new features. I hope you'll take the time to register, if you have not already, so that you may take advantage of all of the new features we have added and will continue to add.