Happy Ninth Birthday Drupal! (A Brief History Lesson)

Today marks the day, nine years ago, that founder Dries Buytaert released Drupal 1.0.0., the first of what is now 6 full releases, the last release being deemed the runaway success story in open source of 2009. It started as a hobby for Dries and is quickly turning into a social publishing, digital revolution. Happy birthday, Drupal! from all of us at Volacci. Here is a Drupal Cake Recipe from Dries Buytaert’s blog, the picture above is the finished product. Read on for a brief history lesson.

A Brief History of Drupal

Originally written as a message board by Dries Buytaert, Drupal became an open source project in 2001. The name for the project, Drupal, was taken from a now-defunct Drop.org website. Over the years, it’s code has slowly evolved into what Drupal is today.

Dries is still the project lead of Drupal and serves as president of the Drupal Association, a non-profit organization formed to help Drupal flourish. He is also co-founder and chief technology officer of Acquia, a venture-backed software company that offers products and services for Drupal. Dries is also a co-founder of Mollom, a web service that helps you identify content quality and, more importantly, helps you stop website spam. A native of Belgium, Buytaert holds a PhD in computer science and engineering from Ghent University and a Licentiate Computer Science (MsC) from the University of Antwerp. In 2008, Buytaert was elected Young Entrepreneurs of Tech by BusinessWeek as well as MIT TR 35 Young Innovator.

The Origin of the Name

The word Drupal is an English rendering of the Dutch word “druppel”, meaning “drop” (as in water droplet). Originally, Dries wanted to call the site “dorp”, which is Dutch for “village”, but made a typo when checking the domain name. Dries liked his typo better. Just think, we could be developing and optimizing Dorpul, the best open source CMS in the biz! In hindsight, Dorpul might not have been as catchy of a name as Drupal. This only goes to prove that, sometimes, typos can be beneficial.

Merit Badges

As recently as last April, it could be calculated that over 70 well-known brands and non-profits utilize Drupal. But if you have been keeping up with the news lately, Drupal has been quite a popular choice in the last six months. Drupal has won several Packt Open Source CMS Awards and three consecutive times won the Webware 100. Drupal is now approaching its seventh full release, Drupal 7, with a code freeze happening last September.

Drupal Shares a Birthday with...

Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition. Who would have imagined that two different online forces would both be launched on the exact same day? What a moment for the future of the Internet!

Volacci Drupal SEO

Volacci has had the honor and the privilege to have worked with the Drupal project since 2005. When we were known as SprySoft in the early years, we dabbled with the earlier releases of Drupal. (Birthday banner above courtesy of Dries Buytaert's blog)

We have been branding ourselves a Drupal SEO company since 2008, and have been amazed and impressed in watching Dries Buytaert’s hobby turn into a full-fledged, open source force to be reckoned with. But, after watching Dries Buytaert ride a mechanical whale, who wouldn’t be impressed?