Broadband Advisor

Would you say the main aim of Drupal is to empower people to start creating projects?

Empowering people to create powerful Web sites is exactly our aim.

For end-users, Drupal is a product that they can download and install. We want to empower end-users so that they don't need to hire a developer or a designer to create a Web site.

For developers, Drupal is a Web application platform. We want to empower developers by providing them with a flexible and powerful development framework so that they can extend Drupal.

How many users do you estimate Drupal has?

It's impossible to count, but I estimate that there are roughly 200,000 public facing Drupal sites.

There are also a fair number of intranet Drupal sites that are locked behind company firewalls. It is even harder to estimate those.

Last year, Drupal was downloaded more than 600,000 times. That's also a partial view as we can't track all downloads.

Approximately how many contributors does Drupal have?

Thousands of people have contributed in numerous ways. More than 500 developers contributed patches to the Drupal 5 core, the main Drupal distribution. Over 1800 developers contributed Drupal modules (third-party extensions that can be added to the core) for Drupal 5.

Hundreds of people have contributed to the documentation and thousands of people contribute in the support forums. Volunteers from all over the world have answered over 100,000 Drupal support questions.

There have been at least three books written about Drupal, which is also a significant contribution, and Google donated $US100,000 to the project through the Summer of Code program.

How many re-packaged distros and third-party applications of Drupal are there?

There are more than 1800 third-party modules for the Drupal 5 release.

How important are third-party developers to Drupal's distribution?

Very important. The beauty of Drupal is the fact that there is a large library of contributed modules that allows people to get a site up and running quickly.

It makes Drupal not just a CMS, but also a powerful application development platform that allows one to efficiently combine different contributed modules into one application or Web site.