On the surface, the three-year-old Drupal system is optimized for community oriented sites, providing clean, XHTML-compliant, CSS layouts in a default installation. An important design consideration for many in the development community is user-friendly, accessible code that works for those with disabilities.

The core is in active development, and not only provides a good base for sites focused on community building, but also efficiently glues together different components and technologies. This allows Drupal to have many out-of-the-box features such as distributed authentication, community authoring, and extensive support for RSS output. Even RSS aggregation is supported, allowing Drupal to act as an online news aggregator in the style of Bloglines or MyYahoo.

The core modules are cleanly coded and provide a good base for extension by contributed functionality such as multiple templating systems, text markup languages, and WYSIWYG editors. The minimalist codebase also includes proven caching and throttling capabilities, allowing Drupal to survive heavy page requests (even a Slashdotting!) while continuing to serve up dynamic pages. The developers embrace reuse: It is hard to find any duplication in the core code, making for a consistent interface and flexible content publication capabilities. The system is focused on supporting the UTF-8 encoding, enabling sites to mix text in different languages across the entire site, and even on the same page.