Drupal is a content management system and web application framework built on PHP and a LAMP stack. It has an modular architecture that allows for easy extensibility and scalability. Some key enterprise concerns that Drupal addresses are security, through features like preventing file execution and mitigating XSS and SQL injection attacks, and scalability through its ability to scale web servers, databases, and other components horizontally. The future of Drupal is bright with over 7,000 contributed modules and close to 4,000 committers supporting ongoing development.

1. Drupal Introduction
Why enterprises should consider it
@manishgarg

2. What will we cover?
• Drupal?
• Architecture
• Top Enterprise concerns
– Security
– Scalability
• Future of Drupal

3. INTRODUCTION

4. What?
Content Management System (CMS) …
Yes, but …
Web application framework
PHP, xAMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack
Tools

5. History
Developer centric Admin Biz centric

6. Who?
Government Whitehouse.gov, restoreTheGulf.gov, Teach.gov, several
counties
Corporate intranet AOL, Yahoo Research, NetApp, Intuit …
Art, music, multimedia MTV UK, Sony music, Warner Brothers, Vocalo.org
Social networking sites GoingOn.com, Jewcy, DrupalSN, madeloud.com
E-commerce ticketcake.com, …

7. Why?
• Out of the box
• Build & Extend easily
• ThereIsAModuleForThat
• Connect & Collaborate
– Apps
– Community
• Scalable & Secured
• FREE!!

8. What’s fueling the growth of Drupal
• Licensing
• ~20 distributions of Dupal (intranet, education…)
• Community, Community, Community
Events and Meetups
Chat (IRC)
Planet Drupal
Community Spotlight
Forums
Mailing lists
Commercial support

9. ARCHITECTURE

10. Architecture
LAMP stack
Core modules
Contributed and developed modules
Theme (template engine)

11. Database
Custom content type = objects
Custom modules or hooks
Custom blocks / menus
Extend user roles and perms
Theme existing one or create new

12. Core concepts
• Nodes: Content type or objects
• Hooks: Internal event handling (this is what
we cover here)
• Theming: Assembling the web page
• Views: UI driven query engine for reports,
lists, etc.

13. Hooks
• Basic contract between Drupal
and the different modules
• Sort of like well-known or
contractible function names
myModule_menu(…)
myModule_formAlter(…)
Module
1. Defines
2. Calls

14. SCALABILITY

15. Scaling
DB
Web Server
File Server
Search
Modular Architecture
• Scale out
• Scale up

16. Scaling – Scale the web servers
DB
WS2
File Server
Search
Load Balancer
WS1

17. Scaling + Failover
DB
WS2
File Server
Search
Load
Balancer
WS1
Load
Balancer
Load balancer cluster

18. Scaling – scale horizontal
DB
WS2
File Server
Search
Load
Balancer
WS1
Load
Balancer
Load balancer cluster
DB
Master slave DB Cluster

19. Drupal support other scaling strategies
as well
• Inbuilt support for Multi-tenancy
• Opcode (php acceleration)
• Memcached
• CSS aggregation
• Compress, minify and cache JS & CSS
• CDN (Content delivery network)
• Resin = 6*php
• CODE REUSE – Modular architecture

20. SECURITY

21. Security
• XSS (Cross site scripting)
• SQL injection
• Files in the FS are protected (.htaccess)
– Files are prevented from execution
• CSRF (Cross-site Request Forgery)

22. OWASP Top 10
Open web application security project
1. Injection
2. XSS
3. Session management
4. Insecure direct object reference
5. CSRF
6. Security Misconfiguration
7. Failure to restrict URL Access
8. Unvalidated redirects and forwards
9. Insecure cryptographic storage
10. Insufficient Transport Layer Protection
http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Top_Ten_Project

23. CURRENT STATE & FUTURE

24. Current
Over 7,000 Modules
Close to 4,000 committers
10s of millions of websites

25. Drupal 7
+
Improved search, file system access
and image handling
• InnoDB support
• SQLLite

26. Getting started
• Get a xMAP stack
• Download Drupal
• Implement a site without writing any code
• Write a new module

27. Challenges
• Steep learning curve initially
• Potentially a new language to learn
• A whole new world and architecture