If you haven't heard about Drupal by now, you should! This is especially true if you consider yourself any type of web programmer or developer. I've been experimenting with Drupal on-and-off for several years and am continously impressed with how easily it allows you to create brand new, powerful, community driven sites.

For those who doubt the strength of Drupal just take a look at a few of the big-name sites powered by Drupal:

Warner Brothers Records
The New York Observer
Fast Company
Popular Science
Amnesty International

The power of Drupal became immediately clearer as I was reading the highly informative Pro Drupal Development book and came across this paragraph detailing the organization of the source code used by Drupal:

The @file token denotes that what follows on the next line is a description of what this file does. This one-line description is used so that api.module, Drupal's automated documentation extractor and formatter, can find out what this file does. After a blank line, we add a longer description aimed at programmers who will be examining (and no doubt improving our code.

Leave no doubt about it, Drupal's "community plumbing" is being used self-referentially to strengthen itself. By organizing community code development, Drupal is laying the low-level framework necessary for highly complex, community driven software. Does this make Drupal the Next Linux? If so, it begs the question, is Google the next Microsoft?

Even the comments made by Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal, on the blog of his new company Acquia, (which just received $7 million in funding by the way) echo this sentiment:

We want to make Drupal the best web content management platform; “the Linux of the web”.