Community Plumbing---made possible with Drupal Community Features


by Fat Jack - Date: 2007-07-25 - Word Count: 649 Share This!

Till the end of the last millennium, the internet could not provide us with far reaching applications for having discussions and sharing files. This led Dries--- the coder of Drupal--- still a student of Antwerp University to develop a small news site with a built-in web board, for exchanging messages with a close group of friends.
After the group graduated from the college, they put this internal website online so they could stay in touch and Dries chose Drop.org as its domain name. The word was chosen to reflect the community aspects of the application, as ‘drop' in Dutch language means village or small community.

In the turn of new millennium, the internet technology advanced by leap and bound and suddenly everybody seemed to start talking about such advanced web technologies, such as moderation, syndication, rating, and distributed authentication.

The Drop.Org became a live experimentation ground of newly emerging web technologies and the software behind Drop.org incorporated them all to emerge as the rich feature packed tool to support community driven website. Finally, in 2001, the software was released with the name of Drupal as a Modular and extensible software to power strong online communities.

There are two major community features that make Drupal the first choice for setting up social networking communities, corporate intranet sites, e-commerce sites or e-learning classrooms.

Cache support
The caching mechanism is mainly used to reducing the server's load. The drupal sites use this mechanism to shake off the percentage of loads from the busy servers. As a result the page generation times increases.

You will understand the necessity of this mechanism from this fact: on very busy sites, hundreds or thousands of pages are viewed per minute. Now every time a page request is sent, dozens of queries are made to the database to pull out the required information. This is a huge task; it may start to slow down the server to the point of crawling. Thus Drupal's Cache feature helps the busy sites a lot in reducing the pressure in data recovery and by speeding up the process of page generation.


Comments on content
Addition of comment feature is the first step to creating a community driven website for supporting community dialogue.

The Drupal websites allow an administrator to assign comment permissions to user groups. In Drupal websites, each comment board has a control panel so that users can customize the way that comments are displayed. This control includes the chronological ordering of posts and the number of posts to be displayed on each page.

Drupal treats comments more or less like other user submissions and allows the use of filters, smileys and HTML in the comments.

It also provides for new comments alert system. It allows the administrator to turn over comment moderation to the community.

Other community features include: Blogger API support, Content syndication, News aggregator and Permalink.

- The Blogger API feature allows the Drupal sites to be updated by different non-web browser based tools for richer editing environment.

- Content syndication allows the Drupal sites to export site's content in RDF/RSS format across the web for a greater viewrship.

- The powerful built-in News Aggregator helps in reading and blogging news from other sites.

- All Drupal contents carry a permanent link or "permalink" feature allowing people to link it freely without fear of broken links.

This easy to install and simple to use software have been the first choice of many of traffic catchers in the web---it is now your turn to adopt it for your website and make your presence felt in the cyber world.



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