Drupal

What is Drupal?
Drupal is a free open source software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. People with limited technology skills are enabled to run their own site, without the need of an outside developer or webmaster to run the system.

What does Advomatic do to make Drupal even better?
Advomatic has been a central contributor to Drupal since our inception. Our staff is involved in the development of much of the core Drupal infrastructure, and we’ve put hundreds of hours into making Drupal the greatest open source CMS on the market.

112Sites Launched
9628 Commits
93 Modules maintained
4000 Total issues

Why do we like Drupal so much?

  1. Don't re-invent the wheel: The web is a very big place, and there are many other sites out there trying to display content, control access, share information, and engage users all in ways similar to you. No need to start from scratch every time. There are thousands of modules in the Drupal repository. Chances are that the tool to do what you want has already been invented.
  2. Momentum: By every conceivable metric (from the number of code contributors to the number of conference attendees), Drupal has more than doubled annually for the past 3-4 years.
  3. The Open Source contribution model: There is no single Drupal company that develops the software, but rather a highly organized community of tens of thousands of developers and implementers around the world. If Advomatic fixes a bug, or extends a module's capabilities in some manner, we contribute those changes back to the Drupal community. The entire community benefits from each other's contributions.
  4. Community: The benefits of contribution do not end at the bytes of code. Drupal is known for its strong local groups. There are over 500 members of the dozens of local developer groups in the New York City area alone.
  5. Scalability and Performance: Drupal is optimized to perform extremely well with information repository sites. The modules allow your organization to add features to the site as your organization grows.
  6. Customizability: Drupal assumes that each website requires information to displayed in a manner specific to that site. Drupal's flexible theme and module systems mean that everything can be manipulated to suit your particular needs.
  7. Usability: Drupal has big plans for improving usability in its next release. By choosing Drupal you receive the benefit of several thorough usability studies that you wouldn't have with a custom application.

Development Blog Posts

Amanda Luker
Jun 2, 2010

Arm yourself with Drupal $body_classes!

A common question I get for theming Drupal sites is how to apply css to specific pages. For example, you might want your background image for your header to change on specific pages. Out of the box, Drupal doesn't give you any class in the HTML that's unique to your node to grab onto. This is... more
Dylan Clear
May 25, 2010

How to Give Your Project A Fighting Chance (Part 1)

"What we learn from lessons learned is that we don’t learn from lessons learned." - T. Block So you are about to kickoff a project. You have a budget, a deadline, and a deliverable: an awesome website launch. As you already know, there are 3 criteria by which... more
Dave Hansen-Lange
May 10, 2010

The dreaded "MySQL has gone away" error

In environments where there are many databases running on the same machine (ex. shared hosting), or in high traffic environments (ex. enterprise sites) it is a common problem that unterminated connections to the database linger around indefinitely until MySQL starts spitting out the "Too many... more