WHAT IS DRUPAL: Drupal is a free and open source modular framework and content management system (CMS) written in the programming language PHP. Like many modern CMSs, Drupal allows the system administrator to create and organise content, customise the presentation, automate administrative tasks, and manage site visitors and contributors. Drupal is sometimes described as a "Content Management Framework" as its capabilities extend from content management to enabling a wide range of services and transactions. Although Drupal does offer a sophisticated programming interface, basic website installation and administration can be accomplished with no programming.

Tens of thousands of people and organisations are using Drupal to power scores of different websites, including

• Community portals
• Discussion sites
• Corporate websites
• Intranet applications
• Personal websites or blogs
• Aficionado sites
• E-commerce applications
• Resource directories
• Social Networking sites

NEWS PORTALS WITH DRUPAL: You can think of many other CMSs like Joomla, Mambo, Django for creating a news portal, but the kind of flexibility that Drupal offers you are unlikely to find in any other CMS.

With Drupal you can do the following (among others):

• Customise what kind of data you wish to have in an article. You can, for example, have not only header-teaser-body, but also newspaper section, editor, issue number, publishing date, links, etc.
• Automatically create article lists according to selected criteria, showing latest sports articles, highest rated article during this week, all articles written by a chosen reporter, or the three latest comments on your newspaper site. These lists may be presented as frontpages in different sections of your site.
• Set end-dates for articles, to unpublish them automatically.
• Allow a group of users to access only some articles or only parts of articles, while another group of users may access more content on your website.
• Use different layout themes on different parts of your website, for example to make your Life style section of your web site look different than the Sports section.
• Automatically display recommended reading to a user, based on how that user rated previously read articles.
• Create RSS-feeds to alert users when new content has been published.
• Allow comments from readers to be published instantly, or after approval.
• Allow editors, reporters and other selected users to add, edit or delete selected types of content, including comments from readers.
• See statistics of how readers navigate your site, and where your readers come from.

[Extracted from an article on the Newspapers on Drupal group.]

YOU ARE CURRENTLY BROWSING A DRUPAL SITE: The newswatch.in site, including this NewswatchPlus microsite, runs on a single Drupal installation. The site, needless to say, features in the newspaper showcase video Drupal Rocks Newspaper and Journalism Websites.

A few Drupal-related relevant details about the newswatch.in site:

• The site uses eight channels
• It has 16 content types
• There are 173 template files
• There are 23 regions
• The site makes extensive use of Contemplate, CCK, Views, NodeQueue and Node Images. The best example for a variety of such combinations would be the homepage itself.

However, if you believe that Drupal would be too high-end for your news website, you might want to go in for WordPress.