Drupal: From Dorm Room to Global Hit

While open-source content-management system Drupal now underpins a huge number of websites around the world, it was created, according to its founder Dries Buytaert, "sort of by accident". The software, which now powers 7.2 million websites, including sites for the White House, Whitehall, NASA and Greenpeace, was devised in a college dorm room in Antwerp, Belgium, in 2000.

"All I wanted to do back then was create a message board so I could share messages with the other people in my dorm," said Buytaert. Rather than using an existing message-board system, Buytaert decided to build one himself with the relatively new technologies of PHP and MySQL.

"I figured that I would spend a few nights building my own, so I could learn these technologies, so that's effectively what I did, although I ended up working on this for 12 more years," he said. That's because Buytaert didn't stop at building a message board, but instead started moulding Drupal into a more sophisticated offering...