Drupal is a tool that I'm crazy about. I've used a lot of content management systems but Drupal is the first one that, even with its very simple, module architecture, allows me to very easily configure the tool to my vision and my requirements, rather than configuring my vision and requirements to the tool.

In the past I've used Mango, phpNuke, Post Nuke, and a variety of CMS systems that all really were one and the same. They all demanded a strict heierachy in content and organization and provided a number of ways to abstract this hierarchy for menus and navigation - in a way you could get them to do most of what you wanted, even if it meant adding a layer of heirerachy that you didn't want, duplicating some content here and there and generally using the easy interface to test and tweak and test and tweak until you got what you wanted.

Enter drupal...

From the onset Drupal very quickly dispenses with a hierarchical concept of pages and directories. It does create them, but it creates them in a many to many world. So you can get down to the task of defining data types, taxonomies and behaviors, rather than just plonking information into various categories.

Drupal starts you out with a couple of standard "content" types, a blog, a "page", a "story". Each has a clear description of why they should be used, and each has a slightly different set of components that make up the data type.

The ability to search drupa.org and find any variety of plugins is
another great benefit. The user community is amazing and offers pretty
seamless integration with a lot of other tools, be it email list
servers, google analytics, SOLR and a variety of other tools.

Drupal truly takes advantage of a number of other resources to make itself
better, rather than rebuilding "like resources" from other systems.

Also there are a lot of tools for bulk manipulation, database importing, and
the like that make converting to Drupal pretty easy too.

We'll
get into an examinationon of how drupal can be used as a rapid
prototyping tool or a sandbox for requirements elicitation and
documentation in the next Drupal Article.