At DrupalCon Chicago 2011 one of many "big picture" questions floating around was a classic philosophical conundrum: Who am I? It seems that rapid growth in the Drupal community and the contribution of myriad features have created an anomaly of software that now seeks to identify itself. Framework, application, content management system - how do we best describe the polymorphic entity that is Drupal?
In a recent interview with Angela Byron, co-maintainer of Drupal, in the April 2011 edition of Linux Journal, she tossed out the word "framlication". Like a saucy blend of framework with application. The difficulty in categorizing Drupal is that it's an ultimately flexible beast. It can output information in almost any way imaginable, and also offers the tools to build admin interfaces to manage the information in almost any way imaginable. With the ongoing contribution of modules that extend it's core features, it would appear to be impossible at any given point to describe it based on functionality.
I actually think it's quite easy to describe. Take one or two steps back from framework or application, and ignore what you can do with Drupal, and think about what you do with Drupal. I would boil it down to this: Drupal is a content foundation. People who use it are concerned with the input and extraction of content. At the centre of what Drupal manages, you find something called a "node". This is the seed for all content, and is what you deal with on a day to day basis.
So, ignore the fact that it could be used to serve data to a mobile app, or that it's a spectacular tool for building community sites, or that you might build a corporate site with it. Realize, instead, that all these tasks are the same thing. They are all ways to create communication paths around content.
In a land where content is king, Drupal is everything else; The roads, the bridges, the markets, the houses and the people. No matter how the villages grow and civilization changes, everyone works together to support the foundation it was built upon.
Well, unless there is a revolution.