By devarishi on

Drupal as an alternative of PHP and Web Site Development Technologies

What Drupal can do for me?

I am into UNIX / Linux Administration type of job role and love to create web applications whenever I see there are tasks that can be automated. I have used PHP for my purposes and I have found it very flexible and easy to use and learn. In fact, I have learnt it by writing PHP scripts directly and experimenting with different outputs and failures until I get a desried output.

Okay, let me come to the main point now. Now I want to be a professional Web Site Developer. I have appeard in some interviews for that kind of job role. But I have failed on certain grounds which involve:

Knowledge of Drupal and other such Open Source Technologies

I really have no knowledge of them. So, I need some information as to what results I can achieve with Drupal. As they say Drupal is a CMS (Content Management System). So, has it to do with the layout / design part of a web site only? Or is Drupal a replacement for any web technologies such as PHP? Or Drupal can help us manage different types of content and generate or display dynamic web pages whose contents vary very frequently and we (site developers or web masters) don't have to worry about how and from where contents are coming...?

So, how do we actually fit Drupal in the frame? Where does it sit in a site? Do we need to learn any different language / coding / scripting to be able to use Drupal?

Thanks!

Dev.

Comments

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

Hi Devarishi,

Welcome to the land of Drupal. Drupal is a CMS without question, but it is not a replacement for PHP - some may say you can know PHP and Drupal per say even though they both work using PHP. Think of Drupal as a web-framework that is both a front end and a backend. So how can it be both?

Drupal websites - what you see in your browser and any interfaces presented are the front end, but behind the scene Drupal has API's that can build forms, present data and it even has a database abstraction layer. It is also modular and supports overrides / hooks.

Drupal can help you display different types of content - one of my clients uses Drupal to be both a brochure site, a blog, an intranet for our partners, a 'classified' whitepaper/article repository and a knowledge base. So yes it can be used for that (that website would be an excellent case study for Drupal.org) Drupal does support granular permissions, but that depends on the module, so if you have a bunch of fellow developers or heaven forbid - marketers just kidding... they can put up content, while you maintain the site and support then when things break.

Drupal is dependent on CSS if you want your sites to look nice, Javascript, Ajax and j-query. These are just a few, and not necessary to know, but good to know if you do or want to devote some time to learn. Drupal does have a fairly steep learning curve, but once you get the 'Drupal way' you will understand for the most part how to achieve a task or what teh API's are doing to protect you ;P