Drupal.org is a wonderfully flexible content management system. The module system allows the creation and maintenance of new functionality, and the open source nature of the project means that there are an ever expanding number of modules to fulfill any number of needs.

Editing of content is simple and managed from a simple admin system, that allows you to quickly add, edit and search content

Display of content can be made to automatically categorize material and add correctly to the menu through the Views and Taxonomy systems.

E-commerce is well catered for using Ubercart, which in conjunction with Drupal's comprehensive search and categorisation functions makes even complex product lines easy to manage.

The user system is at the heart of Drupal allowing users to be given roles and allowed access to subsets of the sites functionality. Roles are a powerful way of organising users into say, administrators, customers, or just anymous browsers

Many major websites are now developed using Drupal including The White House and Sony Music have created a site called myplay which uses Drupal.

Drupal advantages

• Flexibility - Drupal can do anything that PHP and MySQL can do
• Scalable - the system can grow with you and the needs of your users and customers
• Well supported - there are Drupal developers all over the world
• Well documented - the Drupal site has hadbook pages and forums to cover all the information you need to maintain and run a site
• Modular - at any point you can add functionality to your site by adding a new module
• Re-skinable - Drupal's theming system means it's relatively easy to create a new look for your web-site
• Standards compliant - Drupal is built to conform to web standards

Drupal disadvantages

• Because it's open source it can be hard to piece the information and support you need together - but that is where I come in