For testing purposes, or for executing Drupal-related operations but from a PHP script that runs outside of Drupal, I often create independent PHP files that are not meant to be Drupal modules but still require access to Drupal’s database, functions and modules.

Using the function drupal_bootstrap, located within includes/bootstrap.inc, your script can load Drupal and make all of Drupal’s functionality accessible to your script.

IBM.com offers a series of articles following the IBM Internet Technology Group as the team designs, develops and deploys a community website utilizing the best of Open Source technologies.

These articles are meant to offer insight into the development process of complex websites, and offer key comparisons and recommendations as the team describes how and why they decided to use Drupal as the platform of choice for complex web applications.

The following are a few high-profile sites that use the Drupal platform.

Fast Company, a business/technology magazine with over 200,000 pages.

AOL used Drupal in a few projects, including their corporate information website.

Popular Science has been covering science and technology news since 1837. The site has been up since 1999 and was recently re-developed to switch to the Drupal platform. Over 60,000 pages.

Here at Avenue Web Media we have chosen Drupal as our development platform of choice after comparing it to just about every other platform and CMS available.

Drupal is an Open Source Content Management System (CMS), designed for power and flexibility. Considered by many as the most important platform for the PHP programming language, Drupal has a large fan-base of professional developers that use the software for all sorts of commercial projects, and often contribute to extend Drupal with their own work.