Welcome
Welcome to the Drupal community! We're a diverse group of people -- from neophytes to developers, from hobbyists to professionals, from watchers to contributors -- who use and maintain the Drupal Content Management System because we like it so much. It's easy to install, and immensely adaptable too!
With Drupal, you can easily build a powerful, flexible website.
Within minutes of installing this PHP framework, you can have a feature-rich, database-driven site with no knowledge of programming required. And you can add off-the-shelf contributed modules to add even more features to your site.
If you need something beyond what comes with the basic installation and the multitude of contributed modules, you'll need to be familiar with PHP and databases (mainly MySQL), or be willing to learn about them, or be ready to pay someone for their services.
If you're familiar with developing, you'll want to spend time learning Drupal's API and read through the Developer's Guide. The mailing lists and archives are also a good source of information for development.
In our forums we have vigorous discussion over various approaches and viewpoints. And some of us help the community by providing free support. To make the forums more pleasurable and productive for all, please read and keep in mind the forum posting tips.
Open-source communities work best when its members jump in and help out. The Handbooks are a definitive source of information about our CMS. Use them to get familiar with the inner workings of Drupal. If you may find some words, terms or acronyms you are not familiar with, you may take a look on our Terminology page. We will also appreciate if you may not find the right definition or term when you make a simple comment about it on that page. Once you begin working with your first site, you'll figure out ways to do things that nobody else has thought of. Please contribute your knowledge back to the community. Answer questions in the forums if you feel you can help others who have the same questions you once did.
Whether you help in the support forums, write or revise documentation, review patches, or create patches, your help is always welcome. Once again, welcome to this rapidly growing community, and we hope you enjoy using Drupal as much as we do!