This past Saturday, Drupal, our favorite content management system, celebrated it's 21st birthday. Drupal was created by a developer named Dries Buytaert, originally as a message board. After mistyping his original name choice, "dorp", which is Dutch for "village", he instead typed "drop", and decided he actually liked the name better. The name Drupal is meant to stand for the Dutch word "druppel", which translates to "drop", like a water droplet. Dries Buytaert and another fellow University of Antwerp student, Hans Snijder, started this venture in 2000 when they set out to create a wireless bridge between their dorm rooms amongst eight other students. After creating their connection, they created Drop as a means to communicate with one another. By creating a means to share information, news, jokes, schedules, and more with one another, they created the framework of what would become Drupal.
On January 15, 2001, Drupal was officially released as an open source project. Interest began to pick up as more people began to create projects with it, and it gained a significant boost of interest in 2003 when it was used to create "DeanSpace" for US Politician, Howard Dean. "DeanSpace" utilized Drupal's open source management system to link around fifty unofficial Howard Dean websites to allow users to communicate with the campaign and themselves. After the project was disbanded, many users began to realize the potential of Drupal in large scale projects such as political, educational, and medical databases. By 2014, Drupal had shifted to being completely developed by it's dedicated community of open source developers.
Not only is Drupal a useful tool for anyone interested in making a website due to it's open source nature, which is why there are over 1,000,000 websites built using Drupal, but there are also many well established businesses, organizations, and entertainers using Drupal as well. Nasa, Doctors Without Borders, TBS, Major League Soccer, NBA, Verizon, Rutgers, Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer, Lady Gaga, London Government, The Grammys, Bruno Mars, City of Austin, TX, The Louvre Museum, Tesla, University of Minnesota, the Economist, Ebay, and General Electric, just to name a few, all have websites that were built utilizing the amazing technology that is Drupal. With the help of a dedicated community of open source developers, Drupal continues to expand and improve upon it's product, and over the past two decades there have been many upgrades and new releases, the latest being Drupal 10, which is scheduled to be released in June 2022. Of the users of Drupal, 97% report that they are more than happy with Drupal as their content management system and that they will continue to make it their content management system of choice.
Here at Vhical, we are proud to call ourselves part of that 97% and we love creating the projects that our clients need with the help of Drupal. If you are ready to see how we can use Drupal to help reach your website goals, reach out to us! We're located in New Albany, Indiana and we serve the entire Southern Indiana and Louisville, Kentucky area locally, but are available to help no matter where you are located!