Drupal’s design goals include both being able to run well on inexpensive web hosting accounts
and being able to scale up to massive distributed sites. The former goal means using the most
popular technology, and the latter means careful, tight coding.
The operating system is at such a low level in the stack that Drupal does not care much
about it. Drupal runs successfully on any operating system that supports PHP.
The web server most widely used with Drupal is Apache, though other web servers (including
Microsoft IIS) may be used. Because of Drupal’s long history with Apache, Drupal ships with
.htaccess files in its root that secure the Drupal installation (if you’re using a web server other
than Apache, be sure to convert the .htaccess rules to the syntax understood by your system).
Clean URLs—that is, those devoid of question marks, ampersands, or other strange characters—
are achieved using Apache’s mod_rewrite component. This is particularly important because
when migrating from another content management system or from static files, the URLs of
the content need not change, and unchanging URIs are cool, according to Tim Berners-Lee
(http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI).
Drupal interfaces with the next layer of the stack (the database) through a lightweight
database abstraction layer. This layer handles sanitation of SQL queries and makes it possible
to use different vendors’ databases without refactoring your code. The most widely tested
databases are MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Drupal is written in PHP. PHP has gotten a bad reputation, because it is easy to learn so
much PHP code is written by beginners. Like many programming languages, PHP is often
abused or used to quickly hack systems together. However, PHP can also be used to write solid
code. All core Drupal code adheres to strict coding standards (http://drupal.org/nodes/318).
and being able to scale up to massive distributed sites. The former goal means using the most
popular technology, and the latter means careful, tight coding.
about it. Drupal runs successfully on any operating system that supports PHP.
The web server most widely used with Drupal is Apache, though other web servers (including
Microsoft IIS) may be used. Because of Drupal’s long history with Apache, Drupal ships with
.htaccess files in its root that secure the Drupal installation (if you’re using a web server other
than Apache, be sure to convert the .htaccess rules to the syntax understood by your system).
Clean URLs—that is, those devoid of question marks, ampersands, or other strange characters—
are achieved using Apache’s mod_rewrite component. This is particularly important because
when migrating from another content management system or from static files, the URLs of
the content need not change, and unchanging URIs are cool, according to Tim Berners-Lee
(http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI).
Drupal interfaces with the next layer of the stack (the database) through a lightweight
database abstraction layer. This layer handles sanitation of SQL queries and makes it possible
to use different vendors’ databases without refactoring your code. The most widely tested
databases are MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Drupal is written in PHP. PHP has gotten a bad reputation, because it is easy to learn so
much PHP code is written by beginners. Like many programming languages, PHP is often
abused or used to quickly hack systems together. However, PHP can also be used to write solid
code. All core Drupal code adheres to strict coding standards (http://drupal.org/nodes/318).
