Information on Drupal
Drupal is a free, open-source web development platform for online content and user communities. Drupal powers some of the busiest sites on the web, and can be adapted to virtually any visual design. Drupal runs over a million sites, including WhiteHouse.gov, World Economic Forum, Stanford University, and Examiner.com.
Drupal is open
Drupal was created over ten years ago and released as open-source software under the GNU Public License. That means it’s completely free to download, use, and modify: There are no purchase, license, or maintenance fees.
Drupal is web development
Drupal’s default installation is a database-backed web platform with file maintenance tools and a high level of security. Many developers take advantage of Drupal’s extensible architecture to go far beyond the “core” package.
Drupal is social
Drupal is a multi-user system, letting site visitors log in (as “authenticated” users) or browse the site without doing so (as “anonymous” users). You control their access levels, and can also assign “roles” for multiple permission levels.
Drupal is content
Drupal both hosts and promotes your content. It can reach out beyond your site to give you a presence on Twitter, Facebook, and in other venues. Drupal’s built-in features also give search engines what they want, improving your web impact automatically.
Drupal is scalable
Drupal has proven itself repeatedly in the field on sites with over a million pages, and at over 20,000 requests per second. Its core installation handles over 99 percent of use cases, while free optimization tools and a large base of Drupal-trained administrators address the other one percent.
Drupal is design
Drupal site designs come from “themes”, whose visual presentation is described in standard CSS. Drupal.org hosts hundreds of free, fully customizable themes, including several “base themes” to help you launch your own designs.
Drupal is everywhere
Drupal runs millions of web sites, including many of the world’s biggest. It’s especially strong among major governments and industry-leading enterprises, but is easy enough to be the platform of choice for individuals and small companies.
Drupal is secure
Drupal is used by thousands of high profile web sites and is subject to rigorous security testing both by the Drupal community and by security experts around the world. Drupal's core code has been proven to prevent common security vulnerabilities such as those defined by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP).
Drupal is radically changing on-line spaces. Is your space one of them?
When you ask whether you should use Drupal OR write everything from scratch, I'd definitely go for Drupal.
What makes Drupal shine for me is its versatility in defining "atomic" elements of any website: user profiles content types, and above all: its taxonomy, i.e. an extremely flexible system to organize any "semantic content" you want to throw in your site. Having these "atomic building blocks" at your disposal, Really feels like a big relief. It's simply Fun to play around with them.
Sure, you can program all this yourself. But you'd be in for many, many months, and then still you'd probably have only a fairly shaky thing. Drupal deals with about 100 database tables, one hundred. Just getting those to work nicely and reliably together would give you many months of headache.
The confidence in the power of Drupal as an enterprise-class application framework by many fortune 500 companies confirms that the flexibility of Drupal as a platform
combined with solid design and development resources, creates the possibility for rich user experiences and large-scale web solutions. This is solid proof that these companies can combine the robust flexibility of the Drupal platform, with the world class skills of dedicated designers and developers from the Drupal community, to build rich content work flows and social networking features into a powerful web tool sets to serve and support massive customer bases globally while eliminating licensing and residual costs from competing proprietary solutions.
