Drupal is used to build everything from personal blogs to enterprise applications. Thousands of add-on modules and designs enable you to build any site you can imagine. Drupal is free, flexible, robust and constantly being improved by hundreds of thousands of passionate people from all over the world.

Quality Programming
High quality, elegant, documented code is a priority over roughed-in functionality.

Web Standards
Drupal supports established and emerging standards. Specific target standards include XHTML and CSS.

Low Resource Demands
To ensure outstanding performance, Drupal puts a premium on low profile programming (for example, minimizing database queries). Drupal also has minimal, widely available server-side software requirements. Specifically, it is fully operational on a platform with a web server, PHP, and either MySQL or Postgresql.

Open Source
Drupal is based on the open source philosophy of collaborative free software development and is licensed under the Gnu Public License (GPL). Drupal is itself open source and builds on and supports other open source projects. It is programmed in the open source scripting language PHP and supports as primary data sources the open source database formats MySQL and Postgresql.

Ease of Use
Drupal aims for a high standard of usability for developers, administrators, and users. While there is a significant learning curve, extensive online documentation and widely available books can facilitate CMS usage.

Web 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 personal computers.

Templating
Drupal's theme system separates content from presentation allowing for control of the look and feel of the site. Templates are created from standard HTML and PHP programming (meaning that proprietary templating languages are unnecessary).

Modularity & Extensibility
Drupal provides a slim, powerful core that can be readily extended through custom modules. Core features and custom modules of special interest that may be utilized to extend and enhance the site's functionality include, but aren't limited to:

• Polls
• Blogs
• Discussion forums
• Content syndication/RSS feeds
• eCommerce
• Auctions
• Multimedia
• Newsletters
• WYSIWYG editors

Search Engine Optimization
Drupal provides an alternative to addresses such as www.lciderby.com/?q=node/67, which aren't user-friendly. Furthermore, search engines will give better rankings to pages that have more human-friendly URLs, especially if they include relevant keywords (e.g., www.lciderby.com/lake-champlain-water-quality).