For those who are not familiar with the acronym CMS, it stands for ‘Content Management System’ and refers to scripts that you can use to run, update and edit your website. There are many, many CMSes out there, but today I want to put the spotlight on my personal favourite: Drupal.

Not only was it named the overall winner in the 2007 OpenSource CMS awards it is my choice of CMS for most of the sites we develop.

Why do I think it’s worthwhile? Well it has a huge array of features, it is relatively easy to develop custom modules for it and it’s also a breeze to theme. Being open source and having a very active and supportive developer-base is again a huge plus.

Out of the box the experience is great. Installation is simple (especially if your host offers Fantastico) and the learning curve is much more gentle compared to some other CMS options out there (such as Joomla/Mambo - though they have their positives too). As part of the default install you get a load of goodies, but some of the really exciting stuff can be found in the optional modules which you can download and install.

Some modules/features I could not be without:

• Clean URLs - now part of the core, it’s certainly a fantastic tool for good SEO and plain ease-of-navigation for regular visitors
• TinyMCE editor - a new addition to the core distribution, this rich text editor makes using the CMS simple for the average user
• e-Commerce- not needed for every site, but this module has practically everything you need to set Drupal up with an online store
• XML/Google Sitemap- a must for larger websites that want to provide accessible sitemaps
• Pathauto - if you’re too lazy to set paths yourself
• LoginToboggan- when you want to streamline the user registration/login process, go LoginToboggan

There are many, many more great modules (both core and non-core) that I could have included, but these are some gems that are definitely worth having a look at for your Drupal site.

And these are some of the reasons why I like Drupal so much. If you have your own modules you couldn’t live without or your own stories you want to share, feel free to comment.

Like I said, there are many content management systems out there and Drupal is but one. Another great CMS is the one powering this very blog - WordPress - which I will likely cover this at a later date. Two other quite prominent CMSes worth looking into are Mambo and Joomla.