The past, present and future of CMS Drupal, part 1

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

Ten years ago, at the University of Antwerp, a few 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 working on this task, these students needed a platform where they could discuss news, technical solutions, and in general everything that pleases. One of them took up writing a site for a “public board,” which would allow friends to tell each other. His name was Dries Buytaert - now he is known as the “founding father” of Drupal. (Of course there is a separate page on the university website :).

The program basis of the site had no name until a certain time. Until Dris went to university, it was an exclusively internal bulletin board, meeting the need for a simple exchange of news / links / materials for a small group of students. But later, when these people completed the training, they decided to make the internal university website public. They wanted to continue to exchange news, interesting links, their own discoveries in the field of programming. Dries was looking for a suitable domain name ... During the search, Dries and his friends settled on the name dorp.org. “Dorpje” in 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” from English - “drop”, which explains the Drupal logo).
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For a while, the community was absorbed in discussing new technologies. How to correctly implement rating systems, moderation, user authorization and other issues from the world of web technologies.

It was only later in January 2001 that the software on which drop.org worked was called “Drupal”. It was another game with words and pronunciation. Since they made a mistake with the “village” and called the site “drop”, “drop”, would it be possible to call the product “Drupal”? Why? Because the Dutch word “druppel” (in the lane- “drop”) is read in English as “droo-puhl”, it is written accordingly “drupal”. This is one of the clearest examples of how the name, which is based on not a marketing plan, but a simple joke, has become famous throughout the world.

Finding information about what happened with Drupal (by the way, this is incorrect transliteration, but the already well-established Drupal pronunciation 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 site drupal.org for 2001. Immediately after moving from drop.org
2. January 2002.
3. August 2002.
4. November 2002. Time for brevity and great work on the community site.
5. December 2003 .

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



Although very few sources remained, about what happened to the project during these years, it was then that the foundation of the whole architecture was laid, many 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 each Drupaler, appeared, how friendship with the JQuery project originated and what came of it all.

An interesting observation: on the site drop.org there is a logo, suspiciously similar to the Joomla logo. And the owner of the domain is still Baytaert (whois: Registrant Name: Dries Buytaert). Conspiracy?:)

Thanks for the information provided:
Site Packt Pubishing
The “History” section on drupal.org
Google for keeping an eye on all of us, and does not allow you to forget the good.

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