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Drupal is a free/libre open-source Web-based content management system (CMS) which is used by Wikinerds Portal and many other sites wordwide. As with any CMS, the level of support one can get is very important. Recently a molecular biologist and member of the Drupal community, finished an analysis of the Drupal support forum which shows a very high percentage of responses to questions: 73.3% of posts on the forum get a response, and this is very important considering that it is done on a voluntary basis by members of the free software community and Drupal users who help each other for free, without any monetary reward. Of course, there are also professionals who work with Drupal and will be happy to provide guaranteed services to commercial enterprises that have special needs. According to the analysis of Mr. Knapen, the highest percentage of responses (80.1%) were found in the "pre-installation questions" forum and the lowest (68.8%) in "module development" (a module is a piece of software used in conjuction with Drupal to provide more features). While the analysis shows that the Drupal support community is very active, it should be noted that it only counted responses, not solutions. However, a high level of activity in a support forum is often related to support quality and number of solutions given. The Drupal community seems to be very active, whith frequent software releases and quick resolution of security bugs, while their CMS software is available under the GPL.
The text of this story is Copyright (C) 2005 by Nikolaos S. Karastathis. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the licence is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".