What Is Drupal?

I had lunch with Gus Tai today (Gus is one of my favorite guys in the venture industry and a fun guy in general). He asked me about my recent posts on drupal.

Drupal is a content management system (CMS). Drupal allows you to create a web site intended for groups of people to interact. I don't know if www.newsvine.com is hosted on drupal, but it could be. Unlike a wiki, the idea is not that multiple people collaborate on specific articles. Rather, it is sort of an advanced version of internet forums. It allows one person to post an article and then for lots of people to comment on it. It also has lots of nice features built-in, like support for voting and polls, the ability to show you who is currently online, to syndicate new posts in the form of RSS, and so on.

In a sense it's kind of like a group blog. If you consider that a blog is for one person to post their thoughts and other people to comment, then a drupal hosted site is like getting a newspaper article and "letters to the editor" in real time. Multiple people can post their thoughts in the form of articles, and multiple people can comment on those posts.