What Is Drupal?
What Drupal is and who it is built for
Drupal is an open-source content management system (CMS) that lets organizations build websites with structured content, custom workflows and detailed permissions. It is written in PHP and maintained by a large community of developers, with the non-profit Drupal Association supporting the project.
Drupal suits sites that outgrow a simple blog or brochure site. Typical users include government agencies, universities, media companies and large businesses. These organizations often publish thousands of pages, work with many editors and reuse the same content in several places, such as a website, a mobile app and a partner feed.
For a side-by-side view, see how WordPress, Joomla and Drupal compare.
How Drupal organizes content: content types, fields and views
Drupal starts from the idea that content has a shape. A content type is a template for one kind of content, such as a news article, an event or a staff profile. Each content type has fields, which are typed slots for information: a date field for an event, an image field for a profile photo, or a reference field that links a person to a department.
Internally, Drupal treats most items as entities, a general term for content, users, files and taxonomy terms. This lets a site model itself closely on the organization it serves. Views is the built-in tool for listing and filtering content. An editor can build a list of upcoming events, sorted by date and limited to one region, without writing code.
WordPress offers a similar idea through custom post types and custom fields, but Drupal includes this structure in its core.
How modules and themes extend Drupal
The Drupal core provides the essentials: users and permissions, content management, the entity system, caching and a basic admin interface. Other features are added through modules, packages of code that extend or change the system. Thousands of contributed modules cover areas such as commerce, search, multilingual content and accessibility.
Design is handled by themes. Drupal themes use the Twig templating language to separate markup from logic, so designers can change the look of a site without touching the underlying content model.
Relying on modules means a site carries only the features it needs. It also means teams must choose, test and update those modules carefully.
Example: a university with many departments
A university runs a central website with separate departments, each with its own pages, staff lists and course catalog. In Drupal, the team defines content types for courses, people and news. A course can reference the department that teaches it, and one list view can show every open course across the university.
Permissions can be set per department, so an editor in the physics department can update their own pages but not the homepage. This kind of structured, multi-team setup is where Drupal is often chosen. A simple blog would need extra work to model the same relationships.
Frequently asked questions
Is Drupal harder to learn than WordPress?
Usually, yes. Drupal asks you to plan the content model, including content types, fields and user roles, before you build. Site builders and developers need to understand how entities and configuration fit together. WordPress is generally quicker for a simple site, while Drupal rewards the extra planning on large or complex projects.
Who uses Drupal for their website?
Drupal is used by government bodies, universities, news publishers, nonprofit organizations and large companies that need structured content, strict access control and many editors. It is less common for small personal blogs, where simpler tools usually suit better. Many organizations rely on agencies or in-house developers for the initial build.
Is Drupal free to use?
The Drupal software is free and open source, so there is no license fee to download and use it. Running a Drupal site still costs money for hosting, a domain name, design, development and ongoing maintenance. Many organizations also pay agencies or in-house developers to build and update their sites.