What Is Drupal?

Drupal is a content management system. In other words, it is software that organizes and displays web pages like articles and blog postings (along with other content such as videos, images and music).

Drupal stores your content in a database which is organized into tables and the tables are made of rows. Each row is a collection of related fields. For example, in a table used for storing contacts, the row might have fields called user_name, address and phone_number.
When Drupal is installed it creates a database that holds the content and the administration information for your website.

Unless you are a real systems administrator you will probably never need (or want!) to interact directly with the database. Fortunately Drupal provides you with a simple but powerful web interface for managing your site.

About a Theme.

The appearance of your content (in other words, the colors, fonts, placement of elements etc.) is controlled by the "theme". There is the option to use one of the default themes or download a theme from the Internet.
If you need a different design, it's possible to modify an existing theme (relatively easy) or create a theme from scratch (relatively challenging).

The default Drupal installation provides several "content types" such as blog and story. You can also define your own content types, perhaps adding new fields where your authors can provide additional information about an article.

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You can modify the theme so that different content types will display differently and you can restrict access to certain content types. For example, you might have some content which should only be displayed to registered users.

Although the default Drupal installation provides many options for creating, organizing and displaying content you will probably find that there are other features that you would like to add to your site. The chances are very good that the capability you need is available in a "module" contributed by another Drupal user. Some of the contributed modules have been refined over a number of years to become very powerful and useful. For example, many Drupal sites make use of the Content Construction Kit (CCK) module (for creating custom content types) and Views module (for displaying lists of content).

Static vs dynamic web sites.

Traditional websites are static, meaning the content doesn't change. You create a Home page and you put that file into your directory tree as index.html. You may also create an Article and put that file into your directory tree as article1.html. Then you add a link to your home page for people to access the Article.

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For someone to find the article they will need to be on a page that contains a link to that article and the only links to that article will be ones you create. The appearance of the content is defined in the HTML or CSS, each difference must either be hard coded into the content file or linked to an individual CSS sheet.

Drupal, on the other hand, is dynamic, meaning your content is stored in a database and presented to the user when the web server receives a request from a browser. This means that a Drupal site won't have these individual HTML files. If you looked in your directory there won't be an index.html or article1.html file, the article content is contained in the database and the appearance is controlled by the theme (which is a separate collection of template and CSS files).

You can create a static Home page, or make only a portion of the Home page static (sticky), or have the Home page change as often as you add content. You create the information once, and then have various possibilities on how you want it to look, and where and when someone will or won't see it.

This article is a modified version for non technical savvy users.
The original article can be found at:  http://drupal.org/node/123945