From a Drop to The Largest CMS Ocean

Emerged as one of the most powerful PHP-based open source, Drupal is a very convenient platform for users all over the world across numerous industries.
It helps us in enhancing publishing, managing and updating content on our websites. It delivers excellent service and quality from blogs to enterprise grade websites! Not just this, it's highly secure and user friendly.
It's innumerable features help the user give a personalised touch with just a single click. And the best part? This is an open source framework and doesn't need a license to get started.
It is the mixture of power and flexibility with new features and modified content with each new version.

Drupal 1.0

It's content was fully featured and had a self incorporated discussing engine which promoted news driven community. It didn't have a menu router which means that everything was accessed through php files. All its themes were simple and elegant and the users got to control all the aspects of the site including colours layouts and positioning. Its core themes include jeroen, Marvin and unconed.

Features:-

• Story Submissions
• Diary
• Accounts
• Comments
• Search
• RDF/RSS headlines
• Calendar

The Global Community- Drupal 2.0

This version was a huge upgrade from the 1st version and had several new features. The best part of which includes the addition of internationalisation support. Apart from this there was a fine user permission system and also ratings which helped other users to select from a wide variety of options. A new section for stories had been inculcated along with rewritten comment and discussion. This version had 22 core modules and took 2 months to be presented and developed.

Features:-

• Added fine-grained user permission system
• Added user ratings
• Added sections for stories
• Rewrote comment/discussion

Node ‘3’- Drupal 3.0

The 3rd version of Drupal had a drastic modulation where every framework was now based on nodes. Where the concept now focused on nodes instead of pages. It was a very early evolution since it was only after mobiles that we began to revolve less around pages. It has 26 core modules and took 6 months to be developed and presented.

Features:-

• Framework for all content types
• Focused on the concept of "nodes" rather than "pages"
• With the rise of mobile, web revolved less and less around pages

Content Management System - Drupal 4.0

Features:-

• Close to a major 100 sites running Drupal
• Taxonomy
• International open source project

Drupal 4.1

• Added profile.module
• Added pager support
• First theme functions
• Comment moderation, improved forums, improved statistics tracking, various performance improvements

Drupal 4.2

• Ease of use and administration
• Clean URLs

Drupal 4.3

• Improved user-friendliness, both to end-users and administrators
• URL alias support through new path.module
• Database prefixing
• Breadcrumbs
• Mass node operations

Drupal 4.4

• Added a file API
• Added field sets
• Added many new theme functions and refactored existing existing theme functions
• First E-commerce contributed module

Drupal 4.5

• Configurable Menus
• Tab based user interface
• Multiple roles per user
• Customizable user profiles
• Translational Improvements

Drupal 4.6

• PHP5 support
• Multi-site support to run multiple Drupal sites from a single code base
• Personal contact forms for registered users
• Added an image API
• Made the ping module ping pingomatic.com which will ping all the major module ping services

Drupal 4.7

• There have been over 338 contributors with 1500+ patches
• Major usability improvements and new Drupal core functionality
• Views module introduced
• Lots of Js and AJAX
• New forms API

Drupal coming out to the world - DeanSpace

As Websolutions Agency say:

Interest in Drupal got a significant boost in summer of 2003 when it helped build DeanSpace for Howard Dean, one of the 2004 US presidential election candidates. DeanSpace provided something like Drupal distribution which anyone could download and install his own Dean-site. As campaign grew more more, Drupal saw 300% increased activity on drupal.org in terms of content.

The New Drupal - Drupal 5.0

This version was released exactly 6 years after the launch of Drupal's first version. There were over 492 contributers in the release with about 1173 patches being submitted and 2500 contributed modules. It had a web based installer which meant no more manual import of the sql dump and a very neatly organized module directory plan. It's features included pluggable cache backends. Even the JS was replaced by jQuery 1.0.4 along with easy download of ready made packs. It had a CSS processor which made the site faster and all sheets were compressed into one single file. It also had a new colour module enabling the change of entire colour schemes. It had 29 core modules and took around 8.5 months for development.

Features:-

• Web-based installer
• Reorganized module directory structure
• Added support for Module dependencies
• Plugable cache backends
• jQuery 1.0.4
• Custom content types
• Added support for Drupal distributions

Secure and Safe - Drupal 6.0

This version reached the stage of EOL on 24th February 2016 by the time of which over 120000 websites had been using Drupal 6 with over 7000 contributed modules and 600 custom themes. It had a friendlier installer and the drag and drop feature enabling easy editing. The main aspect about this version was that the menu system has been written from the scratch which made it more efficient and powerful with improved security. Even the Whitehouse went Drupal on October 2009 which was a turning point. It had 34 core modules and took 13 months to be developed.

The White House goes Drupal

Features:-

• Drag and drop administration
• Menu system rewritten from scratch, making it more efficient and powerful
• Improved security

From Blogs to Micro-sites to Enterprise Level Systems - Drupal 7.0

This version was then used for all kind of websites, blogs and microsites to enterprise level systems with over 11000 contributers, 600 themes and more than 200 distributes where everything is an entity with everything revolving around web apps.

Features:-

• Drupal now used for building any kind of website from blogs to microsites  to enterprise level systems
• Everything is an entity
• Now its all about web apps

Build Something Amazing - Drupal 8.0

Finally on 19th November, 2015 Drupal last and latest version was released with a better core release cycle and the use of semver numbering system.
Not just this, this version was launched with a promise of minor releases every 6 months with new features incorporated each time.

Features:-

• Purely a building tool. Previous versions of Features included extensive workarounds to make up for the lack of support for configuration export in Drupal core.
• Automatic Packaging
• Highly Configurable
• Interoperability build in.
• Support for feature sets.

Best Among All CMS

Always functioning and providing the users with new and better features and options, Drupal has never failed to evolve and impress ahead its own time. It has always focused on providing a convenient platform for all types of people and giving them tailor made services.

All of this proves that the age of Drupal is not fading any time sooner with more and more of the population switching to this friendly software.

I personally love the experience of using Drupal in many ways. Everything Drupal offers is remarkable in its own way. Drupal offers more than just modules and themes, It comes with the option of choosing from the variety of modules and third-party integrations that can be used for developing a website adhering to your preference. It comes with clean markup code out of the box that makes it easy for developers to manage content publishing.

Sources:-

• https://www.agiledrop.com/blog/history-drupal
• https://www.slideshare.net/WEBSOLUTIONSHR?utm_campaign=profiletracking&utm_medium=sssite&utm_source=ssslideview
• https://www.vardot.com/en/blog/evolution-drupal-drop-10-drupal-8