Drupal features

While Drupal out of the box has some pretty powerful features, the real flexibility comes from the thousands of (free!) modules available. Here’s a list of some of the more important features and commonly requested functionality of Drupal and its modules.

General Features:

Searching - All content in Drupal is fully indexed and searchable at all times, with an advanced search also available. Additional modules can also provide sortable, faceted search.
Content Types - Are a reusable collection of fields for storing your content, such as a “Story” or “Press Release” or “Job Posting”.
Content Fields - Are individual fields for content that store a specific piece of data, such as a numeric price, text field, or image.
Customize Layouts - Drag and drop system that lets you visually place content where you want it to go on the page.
jQuery - Is a free, open-source framework that makes writing JavaScript painless, with hundreds of plugins available.
Multi-site -If you are running more than one Drupal site, you can simplify management and upgrading of your sites by using the multi-site feature which allows you to share a single Drupal installation among several sites.
Taxonomy - Is the practice of classification according to relationships. In Drupal, this is one method administrators use to organize content in a web site. Taxonomy is created from ‘Vocabularies’ that contain related ‘Terms’, and can be free tags or controlled and hierarchical.
Templating - Separates content from presentation allowing you to control the look and feel of your Drupal site. Templates are created from standard HTML and PHP, using CSS (style sheets) for styling.
Views - A flexible method to control how listings of content are presented, filtered, and sorted.

Platform Features:

Apache or IIS, Unix / Linux / BSD / Solaris / Windows / Mac OS X Support - Drupal was designed from the start to be multi-platform.
Database Independence - Allows the use of different database servers using the same code base.

Performance and Scalability:

Caching - Drupal knows to fetch this page out of the database rather than re-generating it from scratch.
Diagnostic Tools - Troubleshoot issues with site performance and stability.
Personalized Settings - Users can personalize form settings per user or per role.

Site Navigation Features:

Configurable Menus - Add multiple menus of any depth - primary, secondary, and deeper.
Custom Breadcrumbs - Administrators can set up their own customized trails to trace site navigation.

SEO Features:

SEO-friendly URLs - Automatic search engine-friendly links that are customizable, and can also redirect multiple paths to avoid duplicate content.
Meta Tags / Page Titles - Set specific keywords for pages and titles to optimize search engine positioning.
Site Map - Is a hierarchical list of pages on your website that can be automatically submitted at a regular interval to search engines.

User Management Features:

Access Control - Assign groups of permissions to roles for highly specific access control.
User Authentication - Users can register and authenticate locally or use an external authentication source like Jabber, Blogger, LiveJournal or another Drupal website.
Manage Users - Block problematic users, ban IP addresses, host names.
User Profiles - Create any kind of fields for profiles, optionally show these on the registration form.

Content Management Features:

Administration - Allows users to configure their site’s back-end as opposed to the front-end that visitors access.
Clone Content - Allows users to copy a piece of content and then edit the copy.
Flags - Site administrators can customize flags for various types of content - flagging comments, favorites, offensive remarks.
Import/Export - Allows site administrators to export/import their existing content types and views into a repository to share them.
Input Formats - Are made up of one or more filters so that text entered is given a choice of format when added, and text is then saved with that format information.
Publish/Unpublish - Allows user to schedule content to be published or unpublished on a specific date.
Revision Control - Tracks the details of content updates including who changed it, what was changed, the date and time of changes made to your content and more.
Workflow - Allows you to assign a workflow status to a particular type of content - first draft, final, published, etc.
WYSIWYG - Is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. This module allows you to use client-side editors (a.k.a. WYSIWYG editors) to edit content in Drupal.
Content - Custom fields and information for your site.
Addresses - Lets you link your users and their content with physical addresses anywhere in the world.
Calendar / Events - Displays events or content in a calendar format.
Date and Time - Displays date and time on your site.
FAQ’s - Users with special permissions can create their own question and answer pairings.
Front Page - Display different front pages for your site.
Links - Add a complete link to content types including URL, title and attributes.
Project Management - Provides support for organizations, timetracking, invoices, expenses, tasks, tickets.
Polls - Create polls and show them on various pages.
Web Forms - Create a custom form used for questionnaires, surveys, polls, contact/register forms on your Drupal site.

Media:

Audio - Users with proper permissions can upload audio files onto your site.
Embedded Media From Third-Party Sites - Will create fields for content types that can be used to display video, image, and audio files from various third party providers like YouTube or Flickr.
Flash - Insert Flash content without having to write any HTML or PHP code.
File Upload Field - A universal upload field within your content.
Galleries - Supports photos, video and other content.
Images - Upload images to your Drupal site, automatically create thumbnails or add image effects.
Maps - Clickable maps for entering latitude and longitude; create interactive maps.
Video - allows users to submit video to a Drupal site, which can be transcoded, resized, and have thumbnails created.

Content Display:

Printer-Friendly Versions - Allows you to generate printer-friendly, e-mail, and pdf versions of content.
Slideshows - Show customized slideshows of any content, not just images.
Tabbed Content - Create blocks of content with multiple tabs.
Tag Cloud - A visual depiction of user-generated tags, or simply the word content of a site, used to describe the content of web sites.

Communication:

E-Mail Newsletter - Publishes and sends newsletters to a list of subscribers, through your own server or via integration with third-party services like MailChimp.
Signup - Allows users to register for something on your site and sends a confirmation email back to them.
Internationalization / Multi-Language Features - Provides content and site interface translation for anonymous users.
Multi-language - Drupal is designed to meet the requirements of an international audience and provides a full framework to create a multi-lingual website, blog, content management system or community application.
Translatable Comments - Provides a language icon by each comment on your site showing which languages it can be translated into.
Translation Overview - Provides a table list of content in a site and what’s been translated into each language.

Blogging Features:

Blogger Support - Create and publish posts from your desktop.
Content Syndication - Drupal exports your site’s content in a syndicated format for others to gather.
Feed Importing - Import structured feeds as content on your Drupal site.
Permalinks - All content created in Drupal has a permanent link or “perma link” associated with it so people can link to it freely without fear of broken links.

Administration and Analysis Features:

Administration Menu - Navigation and back-end for Drupal.
Analysis, Tracking and Statistics - Drupal can print browser-based reports with information about referrals, content popularity and how visitors navigate your site.
Backup - Backs up/restores your Drupal database.
Counter - Counts how many visitors to your site per second, per minute, per day; however you want.
Drupal Update Status - Checks with drupal.org once a day to see if there are new officially released versions of Drupal as well as new versions of any modules that you are running.
File Management - Provides an intuitive method for managing media files - audio, image, YouTube files.
Google Analytics - Web statistics on numbers and locations of users visting your site.
Logging and Reporting - All important activities and system events are captured in an event log to be reviewed by an administrator at a later time.
Web-Based Administration - Drupal can be administered entirely using a web browser, making it possible to access it from around the world and requires no additional software to be installed on your computer.

Community Features:

Activity - Keeps track of things that users do on your site and then provides mini-feeds of these activities in blocks.
Author Info - A block of user information usually displayed in a forum but can be used in other places. Shows online status, join date, badges, post count, picture, etc.
Chat - Users can set up chat rooms for their site or have access to chat rooms without additional software.
Discussion Forums - Users can post comments to discuss a topic, forums can be hierarchical and optionally private.
Friend/Buddy Lists - One or two-way custom relationships between users.
Guestbook - A site guestbook where users can comment on other people’s entries, delete comments, and create their own individual guestbooks.
Invites - Allows your users to “invite a friend” and send and track invitations.
Notifications - Allows users to be notified of any changes in content via email or private message.
Organic Groups - A community feature that allows users to create and manage their own public or private “groups”, each optionally with their own theme, events, forums, etc.
Participation Rewards (ie. karma or user points) - A rating and community participation system to try to keep the comments as high-quality as possible. When your comments are rated by others, those ratings are combined into a weighted average – newer comments count more than older ones.
Private Messaging - Allows users on your site to send private messages to each other.
Ratings of Content - Allows site users to vote on or review content.
Send To a Friend - Permits you to create a “send this item” link on any content type (image, story, event, etc.).
Status Updates - “Facebook”-style status updates allows users to post to the community what they are up to/what they are doing.
Threaded comments - Drupal provides a powerful threaded comment model for enabling discussion on published content. Comments are hierarchical as in a newsgroup or forum.

Security Features:

CAPTCHA and Content Moderation - Block spam content automatically, or allow users to flag inappropriate content.
Restricted Access - Restricts access so that some users may view content that is hidden from others.

Commerce Features:

Advertising / Affiliate - Provides web content providers with the means to earn revenue from visitors by displaying ads from Google AdSense™ advertising service on their sites.
Donations - Create donation products that are not shippable where end users can specify a donation amount before adding the product to the cart.
Online Store - Create an e-commerce site fully integrated with your content and users, sell shippable physical goods, digital downloads, and more.
Premium Memberships - Allows you to sell premium site memberships from your site.

Third-Party Integration:

Social Bookmarking - Helps readers share, save, bookmark, and email your pages and stories using any service, such as Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Twitter, and over 100 more social bookmarking sites.
Flickr - Access and share photos on Flickr.
Twitter - An application that allows users to show their “tweets” in their user profiles.
Facebook - An application that allows users to show their activity stream/news feeds.
Yelp - An application that allows users to display their Yelp activity such as restaurant and business reviews.
YouTube - An application that allows users to display their “favorite” video clips.
Amazon - Allows users to act as an Amazon Associate store where all purchases made through their site results in a commission going to them.