A Brief History Of The Drupal Open Source Community
Drupal web design, an open source CMS commonly used in web site design and maintenance, boasts a number of unique characteristics: ease of use even by non-technical users, a broad and growing feature set, and easy revisions to design and create content. But perhaps the most meaningful is the Drupal community, a loose association of people who use and create new modules for Drupal. These new modules extend existing features and create entirely new functionality in the code. Drupal community members voluntarily share their work with each other to enhance the user experience for all.
Examining the history of the Drupal community reveals insights about the application itself. Interestingly, most of the early developments took place almost by chance. While studying wireless Internet at university, Dries Buytaert began developing Drupal; he initially needed a message board so his close friends could share all kinds of information. After graduating, he decided to move the message board to the Internet, enabling his friends to continue using it. While researching domains for the website, Dries made another seminal mistake. Meaning to name the site dorp, after the Dutch word for village, he mistyped it, and kept the mistake creating: drop.org.
Drupal Became Open Source.
As the users of the drop.org message board grew, they would contact Dries to request modifications. As a result, he chose to open source the code and the community was born. Users started downloading the code, making their own revisions and new modules and sharing them back to the message board. Dries then chose to name the open source software Drupal, an English version of the Dutch word for drop. Today the community has over 350,000 subscribed members (as of 2008) and millions of copies of the software have been downloaded.
