Popular? or overhyped.

Drupal is one of the largest and most popular CMS (content management systems) on the web today. It appears to have flourished despite leaning on two pretty rickety columns namely PHP (the acronym stands for Personal Home Page) and MySQL, niether of which would appear to be serious products on their nomenclature.

However, and this is a serious point, in common with Drupal itself, both are unencumbered by proprietry software licenses.

Indeed, all three products are open source under a variety of licenses.

Drupal has a huge following said to include Barack Obama, Tim Berners-Lee, Canonical, Amnesty International and Greenpeace. NASA, NATO and the UN, AOL, Sun and Novell, Nike, Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox are all likewise said to be hosting Drupal websites, as are MTV and Sony Music.

However, it is very interesting to observe the makeup of the people who use Drupal and compare them to other opensource communities, in particular those involved in the *nixes.

Linuxquestions.org is a large forum through which new users of the various distribution can detail their myriad problems in installing and tweaking the Linux distribution of their choice. In general, only a tiny fraction of these requests for help are unanswered.

In contrast up to a third of questions posed on the Drupal.org/forum remain unresponded to.

Indeed, I have personally posted some 40 queries, the vast majority of which were never answered.

Anyway, here's what I am planning to do; as I have delved into the workings of Drupal to get my own sites up and running, so I have found the answers to these questions that have remained unanswered. So, over the next few weeks I'm going to put together a series of tutorials to cover them.

But not tonight.

It's midnight. And I'm knackered.