Drupal highlighted as leading Social Web application

Drupal has become a growing force in building Social Websites and sites that have a high level of user interaction.

A recent article by the National Wildlife Federation hails using Drupal as one of the Top 10 ways to change the world using social media.

Build It on Drupal: You may not have noticed, but the open-source Drupal content management system (CMS) has quickly become the dominant player on the social web. While we still prefer WordPress as a strict blogging application, Drupal has emerged as the go-to platform for building scalable, community-driven Web sites. It powers Recovery.gov, a key part of President Obama's commitment to transparency and accountability. PopRule uses it as a social news platform for politics. And Drupal will soon become the platform for Causecast, a site where "media, philanthropy, social networking, entertainment and education converge to serve a greater purpose." This is especially significant because Causecast CEO Ryan Scott is transitioning the site off of Ruby on Rails because Drupal has proved more efficient, user friendly, and cost effective.

The impact of social websites on public opinion is an interesting area of study, but what I think is more telling is the focus on Drupal as an ideal way to deliver a website of this type.

Drupal's CMS (Content Management System) core and the many available modules are perfectly suited to the tasks that a social site needs - managing users with different access levels, publishing content, organising complex categories and tags, as well as a host of usability features and additional modules available for nearly every use you can think of.

If a function is not already available we can make it happen by hooking in to Drupal's core API, designed to make adjusting the system itself easy and powerful.

There is no doubt that Drupal is changing the world by providing a stable, workable system for creating social CMS websites.