Open Source CMS Award Final Five: Drupal

History

Back in 2000, permanent Internet connections were at a premium for University of Antwerp students, so Dries Buytaert and Hans Snijder setup a wireless bridge between their student dorms to share Hans's ADSL modem connection among eight students. While this was an extremely luxurious situation at that time, something was missing. There was no means to discuss or share simple things.

This inspired Dries to work on a small news site with a built-in webboard, allowing the group of friends to leave each other notes about the status of the network, to announce where they were having dinner, or to share some noteworthy news items.

The software did not have a name until the day after Dries moved out after graduation. The group decided to put the internal website online so that they could stay in touch, continue to share interesting findings, and narrate snippets of their personal lives. While looking for an appropriate domain name, Dries settled for 'drop.org' after he made a typo to see if the the name 'dorp.org' was still available. Dorp is the Dutch word for 'village', which was considered an appropriate name for the small community.

Once established on the Web, drop.org's audience changed as the members began talking about new web technologies such as moderation, syndication, rating, and distributed authentication. Drop.org slowly turned into a personal experimentation environment, driven by the discussions and flow of ideas. The discussions about these web technologies were tried out on drop.org itself as new additions to the software running the site.

It was only later, in January 2001, that Dries decided to release the software behind drop.org as "Drupal." The motivating factor was to enable others to use and extend the experimentation platform so that more people could explore new paths for development. The name Drupal, pronounced "droo-puhl," is derived from the English pronunciation of the Dutch word "druppel" which stands for "drop."