Drupal is an open source content management system that can be used to develop a variety of Web sites: personal; corporate; community portals like discussion forums and social networking Web sites; and complex applications like e-Commerce and intranet. The Drupal CMS enables Web editors to easily publish and manage content appearing on the sites.

Drupal is written using the PHP scripting language and is available under the GNU public license. It supports a wide range of operating systems such as Linux, Solaris, BSD, Windows and Mac OSX, etc.

Drupal is based on extensible and modular architecture. Various plug-in modules and components can be easily integrated with it to enhance its basic functions. Customized modules that provide additional/enhanced features not available with Drupal can be developed and integrated with the solution.

The OST team is expert at developing Drupal-based Web applications. Keeping Drupal as a base, we also develop custom modules that can be integrated to provide customized solutions.

Drupal Features

Drupal has many built-in features:

Browser-Based Interfaces: Drupal provides browser-based admin interfaces that can be used to manage a Web site as well as publish and organize page content.

Themes: A library of template themes enables layouts customized to client preferences.

Extensions: A wide variety of extensions are available that can be integrated with the basic Drupal setup in order to provide enhanced and advanced functions such as discussion forums, blogs, shopping carts, podcasting, photo galleries, etc.

Multiple sites: The default Drupal installation enables multiple sites to be run from a single installation.

Search Engine-Friendly URLs: Drupal enables the generation of URLs encouraging to search engines.

Taxonomy: The taxonomy module available in Drupal enables Web site content to be easily categorized and organized in a tree structure making content search easier.

Discussion Forum: Discussion forum features are built into Drupal. The discussion forum module enables users to enter comments and carry on a discussion with other users.

Versioning: Drupal maintains multiple versions of each content item, enabling administrators to track content modifications. Versioning also helps in restoring content of a previous version.

News Aggregator: Drupal provides a built in news aggregator that can be used to gather news/articles from other sites such as blogs.

Polls: Opinion polls on the Web sites can be customized, such as specific user groups only allowed to vote, or multiple answer options displayed, etc.

Multi-lingual: Drupal provides support for multiple languages, so multilingual Web sites can be easily created.

Reporting: The built-in reporting module provides detailed reports on site performance, event logs, etc.

User Profile: Drupal enables registered users of a Web site to create and share their profiles with others.

Content Linking: Multiple content items and articles can be linked to form an online book. This feature can also be used to create FAQs, manuals etc.

Page Caching: Caching helps in improving page generation time and reducing the load on the Web server.

Contact Module: Through the contact module available in Drupal users can send messages to each other through the Web site.

Directory Sites: Web sites developed using Drupal can connect to other directory-listing Web sites.


Drupal offers the following advantages to clients:

Cost Effective: Drupal, as an open source application, is a cost-effective solution.

Support Community: Drupal has a strong online support and developer community. Enhancements and updates are available at regular intervals.

Customizable: Drupal has a modular architecture. Features and functionalities are easily added or removed to meet individual requirements.