Back in the old days (pre-1995ish), we used to have to download special software to our computers in order to buy things, look up things, and build things.
"Madness", I hear you say.
Of course those days are long gone. Nowadays, we all simply expect to be able do everything we need using a web browser. To put it another way, we all expect everything presented to us in some form of "web technology". But, what does it really mean in simple terms?
You probably already know that all the web pages that are a part of our everyday lives are written in the language of
HTML—Hyper Text Markup Language.
If you've ever dug a little deeper, you might also know that the styling of web pages—the colors, typography, layout, and so on are controlled by
CSS—Cascading Style Sheets.
Add some JavaScript into the mix, and web pages become a bit more interactive with things popping up and dropping down all over the place to make the experience a bit richer.
So, there it is. As good today, as it's always been…
Drupal employs one of the aforementioned languages, namely PHP, to build data-driven pages and so provide us with a neat, manageable split between content, configuration, user accounts, and media assets such as images, documents, and video.
PHP is a very widely used open source scripting language that is especially suited to web development because it can be embedded into HTML pages. PHP "pages" are essentially HTML pages with embedded programming code that reshapes the contents of the HTML page dynamically before you get to see it in your browser.
The PHP code is executed on the server, and it generates a complete HTML page, which is then sent to your browser. As far as you are concerned, the end result is a fully formed HTML page, and you have no evidence that it was constructed dynamically by PHP.
Drupal is the clever PHP that brings together the various assets to form the actual visible pages, which are then made available to us across the web using a web server.
For pretty much anything you might want to add to your website, there's a very high chance that among the many modules out there, the very thing you are after has already been coded and posted up into the Drupal community site for public consumption at:
www.drupal.org.
While it is still early days with regard to many of the most commonly used community modules being ready as stable Drupal 8 releases, the number is growing every day.
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