WordPress Theme Development Fall 2025

https://new.drupal.org/home

History

Drupal was born out of a personal project between Belgian students Dries Buytaert and Hans Snijder at the University of Antwerp in 2000. The two created a small internal website using a wireless bridge to share their modem connection between a small group of friends. Dries set up a news site with a web board, allowing users to post their own content, and upon graduation uploaded the site to the internet under the name “drop.org.” A misspelling of “dorp,” the Dutch word for “village,” Drop.org attracted many new users and generated discussions of new web technologies and personal experimentation. In January of 2001, the open-source software was released to the public under the name “Drupal,” derived from the Dutch word “druppel,” meaning “drop.” Today, the Drupal community contains more than one million members committed to collaboration and open-source innovation.

Requirements

Drupal CMS requires a web server connection with Apache 2.4.7 or Nginx 1.1 (or a more recent version of either), or any web server with PHP support; a database connection with MySQL 8.0, MariaDB 10.6, Percona Server 8.0, PostgreSQL 16, or SQLite 3.45 (or a more recent version of any of the above); at least 1GB of RAM; at least 64 MB of memory for PHP; PHP version 8.3 with extensions PDO, XML, GD-library, OpenSSL, JSON, cURL, Mbstring, and zlib; and at least 100MB of disk space. More memory and disk space will be needed as modules, themes, media, backups, and other files are installed, uploaded to, or generated by the site.

Hosted/Self-Hosted

Pantheon, Acquia, Scalahosting, Hostinger, and Sevaa Group all offer support for Drupal site hosting. Drupal CMS can also be self-hosted locally. Hosting a Drupal site is recommended only for Linux or similar operating systems. Windows is supported for development environments, but not production environments.

Cost

Drupal itself is free and open-source. The costs associated with management of a Drupal site will come either from the hosting site of your choice, or the hardware and software required to self-host a Drupal site. ElectroIQ.com estimates the price range of creating a Drupal website to be $15,000 to as high as $150,000, with a an annual maintenance cost of about $3,000 to $10,000.

User Base

According to ElectroIQ.com, there are about 1.3 million registered Drupal members, with 7% of the top 10,000 websites using Drupal and 215,086 Drupal sites in the United States. 34% of sites are for government entities, 22% for higher education, 18% for nonprofit organizations, and 14% for healthcare. Additionally, 71% of government sites utilizing content management systems are built with Drupal, and more than 100,000 universities and college websites use Drupal.