Features of Drupal

• Friendly URLs - Drupal Uses Apache’s mod_rewite to enable customizable URLs that are both user and search engine friendly
• Modules - The Drupal community has contributed many modules which provide functionality that extend Drupal core.
• Open source - The source code of Drupal is freely available under the terms of the GNU General Public License 2 (GPL). Unlike proprietary blogging or content management systems, Drupal’s feature set is fully available to extend or customize as needed.
• Personalization - A robust personalization environment is at the core of Drupal. Both the content and the presentation can be individualized based on user-defined preferences.
• Role based permission system – Drupal administrators don’t have to tediously setup permissions for each user. Instead, they assign permissions to roles and then group like users into a role group.
• Searching – All content in Drupal is fully indexed and searchable at all times, taking advantage of the built in search module.
• User management – Users can register and authenticate locally or using an external authentication source like Jabber, Blogger, LiveJournal or another Drupal website. For use on an intranet, Drupal can integrate with an LDAP server.
• Templating – Drupal’s theme system separates content from presentation allowing you to control the look and feel of the Drupal site.
• Threaded comments – Drupal provides a powerful threaded comment model for enabling discussion on published content. Comments are hierarchical as in a newsgroup or forum.
• Version control – Drupal’s version control system tracks the details of content updates including who changed it, what was changed, the date and time of changes made to the content and more. Content management
• Blogger API support – The Blogger API allows the Drupal site to be updated by many different tools.
• Content syndication – Drupal exports the site’s content in RDF/RSS format for others to gather. This lets anyone with a News Aggregator browse the sites feeds.
• News aggregator – Drupal has a powerful built-in News Aggregator for reading and blogging news from other sites. The News Aggregator caches articles to your MySQL database and its caching time is user configurable.
• Platform – Apache or IIS, UNIX / Linux / BSD / Solaris / Windows / Mac OS X support - Drupal was designed from the start to be multi-platform. Not only can you use it with either Apache or Microsoft IIS but we also have Drupal running on Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows, and Mac OS X platforms.
• Database independence – While many of our users run Drupal with MySQL, we knew that MySQL wasn't the solution for everyone. Drupal is built on top of a database abstraction layer that enables you to use Drupal with MySQL and PostgreSQL. Other SQL databases can be supported by writing a supporting database backend containing fourteen functions and creating a matching SQL database scheme.
• Multi-language – Drupal is designed to meet the requirements of an international audience and provides a full framework to create a multi-lingual website, blog, and content management system or community application. All text can be translated using a graphical user interface, by importing existing translations, or by integrating with other translation tools such as the GNU gettext.
• Analysis, tracking and statistics – Drupal can print browser-based reports with information about referrals, content popularity and how visitors navigate your site.
• Logging and reporting – All important activities and system events are captured in an event log to be reviewed by an administrator at a later time.
• Web based administration – Drupal can be administered entirely using a web browser, making it possible to access it from around the world and requires no additional software to be installed on your computer.
• Caching – The caching mechanism eliminates database queries increasing performance and reducing the server's load.