Drupal is used for at least 1% of all websites wordwide

In an interview for the French newspaper Le Monde, Drupal's founder Dries Buytaert claims that the CMS is used for at least 1% of all websites worldwide ranging from personal blogs to larger corportate sites.

What is Drupal?

Founded in 2001, Drupal is a free and open source CMS (Content Management System) written in PHP. It's used as back-end systems for all kind of websites, such as blogs, corporate and political sites.

According to Dries Buytaert, more than 1% of all websites worldwide use Drupal, the most famous one being the site for the White House (whitehouse.gov).

Drupal's strength: modules

The main advantage of Drupal is the usage of modules. They enable webmasters to add new functionalities to their site.

There are currently almost 6,000 free third-party community-contributed modules available for download in order to add new features or customize Drupal's appearance. By the way, you can read our article about the top sites where to download Drupal themes.

However, Drupal may be difficult for beginners, notably compared to other blog-oriented CMSs like Joomla! or WordPress. But Drupal offers more possibilities to build complex websites.

Drupal 7 to be released

Many efforts have been made to make the next version of Drupal (Drupal 7) easier to use. It's expected to be released in the following months.

The problem is that there will be many changes between the latest version (Drupal 6) and the new version, notably regarding the API. Modules will have to be updated, so it may take some time before all of the modules will be compatible with the new version.

In 2007, Dries Buytaert founded a company called Acquia that provides products, services and support for Drupal. As you know, we're also big fans of Drupal within THEM. Check out our web development services as well as our web design services.