How will Drupal affect web development for groups that adopt it?
A. Drupal provides an extensive feature set for building sites including a MySQL database backend, easy content creation for non-developers, theming and administration for developers, and community features like blogs, polls, commenting, and tagging. All this power comes at the cost of some increased complexity for web developers. Drupal has a learning curve, and the UCAR Drupal User’s Group (UDUG) addresses this with bi-weekly meetings (announced via the cms mailing list) as well as periodic CTTC trainings and access to books and materials. Developers can choose to engage with Drupal on a variety of levels, from using it’s point and click administration interface to installing community contributed modules to extend Drupal to digging deeper and writing your own custom modules in PHP. You can build an extensive site without ever programming in PHP. Modules (extensions to Drupal’s core functionality) such as CCK and Views, provide a powerful way to build sites without programming, enabl
