The Past, Present and Future of CMS Drupal, Part 1

On April 16-17, Moscow will host the first DrupalCamp in Russia . As part of preparations for this momentous event, we have prepared a series of articles telling about how this wonderful content management system was born, how it developed and what awaits it in the future.

Ten years ago, at the University of Antwerp, several students thought about how to conduct a wireless network. One of them had ADSL Internet access, and he wanted to share with the others. In the course of work on this task, these students needed a platform where they could discuss news, technical solutions and generally whatever they like. One of them took up writing a “public bulletin board” site that would allow friends to communicate with each other. His name was Dries Baytaert - now he is known as the “founding father” of Drupal. (Naturally, the university website has a separate page :).

The software basis of the site did not have a name until a certain time. As long as Dries studied at the university, it was an exclusively internal bulletin board satisfying the need for a simple exchange of news / links / materials for a small group of students. But later, when these people completed their studies, they decided to make the internal university site public. They wanted to continue to exchange news, interesting links, their own finds in the field of programming. Dries searched for a suitable domain name ... During the search, Dries and his friends settled on dorp.org. "Dorpje" translated from Dutch means "village", which perfectly described the essence - a site for the community. But - they made an annoying typo, and became the owners of the drop.org domain (“Drop” in English is “drop”, which explains the Drupal logo).

For a while, the community was engrossed in a discussion of new technologies. How to correctly implement rating systems, moderation, user authorization and other issues from the world of web technologies.

And only later in January 2001, the software drop.org worked on was named “Drupal”. It was another game with words and pronunciation. Since they made a mistake with the "village" and called the site "drop", "drop", then do not call the product "Drupal"? Why? Yes, because the Dutch word "druppel" (in the lane - "drop") is read in English as "droo-puhl", spelled "drupal" accordingly. This is one of the brightest examples, as the name, based on which is not a marketing plan, but a simple joke, has become famous throughout the world.

Finding information about what happened to Drupal (by the way, this is an incorrect transliteration, but the already established pronunciation of Drupal in Russian) and the community from 2001 to 2003 is very difficult. But we will try to find something in the archives.

1. Legendary Drop. Archive of the site drupal.org for 2001. Immediately after the transfer from drop.org
2. January 2002
3. August 2002
4. November 2002. Time of brevity and a lot of work on the site community.
5. December 2003 .

If we look at the release schedule for Drupal releases, then from 2001 to 2003 (inclusive), Drupal grew up from version 1.0 to 4.3.



Although very few sources have been preserved, about what happened to the project during these years, it was then that the foundation of the whole architecture was laid, a lot of mistakes were made and corrected, and a solid community appeared.

2004-2008 were years of rapid growth. In the next article, we will tell you when CCK and Views, known to every drupaler, appeared, how friendship with the JQuery project was born, and what came of it all.

An interesting observation: drop.org has a logo that looks suspiciously like the Joomla logo. Moreover, the domain owner is still Baitert (whois: Registrant Name: Dries Buytaert). Conspiracy?:)

Thank you for the information:
Site Packt Pubishing
Section «History» on drupal.org
the Google for that monitors all of us, and does not forget the good.

ps The author of this article now has an account on Habré and you can thank him