What type of site will drupal serve best? Why should I use drupal for my sites or how will I know if drupal will work for my needs?

The answer is drupal will help you build almost anything you are passionate about....

1. Corporate websites, small business websites or portals

2. Online e-commerce applications

3. E-zines or newspaper sites

4. Non-profit and organizational websites

5. Government applications

7. School, university, teacher/student portals

8. Personal or family homepages, CV/Portfolio website,

9. Community-based websites

10. and many more....

Besides, there is a great user community - we think it's one of the best open-source communities around. There are great "modules" - plugins that give you extra functionality - available to help you customize the drupal install to get the kind of site you want, including readily available "profiles" - ready to install drupal installation packages which can, for example, get you started with a shopping website without you having to build it from scratch - which can be downloaded here: http://drupal.org/project/Installation+profiles.

If you need to get a feel firsthand of how drupal works, you may try out our Demo system to play with a test install of drupal. Our focus is to make it easy for you to check out the advanced power inherent in drupal and to try before you buy servers, domain names, etc. Another demo site which used to be good is opensourcecms.com/cms/drupal/, but they are cluttered with way too many ads and the default configuration is not easiest to maneuver. Our demo space is ad-free and easier to test. If you want to try out a demo of drupal with civicrm: http://drupal.demo.civicrm.org/.

The drupal.org site itself is very well organized and though it may be slightly difficult to come to terms with drupal initially, it is well worth the effort. Drupal is a registered trademark of Dries Buytaert.