The software components required to run Drupal (web server, database, programming language, dependency manager, the Drupal software and extensions themselves) are all open source. This has implications for how you might think about setting up and using a system. This demonstration site also includes an example map page that is implemented using only open source web mapping libraries (Leaflet and extensions, Spin) and includes a base map that is based on open, crowdsourced geographic data from OpenStreetMap, although the tiling service currently used is offered through a free usage tier but copyrighted by CARTO.
From an educational perspective, open source is an important initiative in teaching students to think about how they do work and which technologies they might or might not want to adopt as they carry out their work. Do the priorities of the work you are doing align with the ethos of the products, service and organizations you sometimes find yourself relying on to complete your work? If not, can you do something about that? In addition, as students become familiar with a set of open source technologies, the openness provides a path to skills development that is often not available through closed, proprietary tools where you are reliant on someone else's documentation (them telling you) to understand how the technology works.
With open source software, you hope for good documentation. You may even demand good documentation. But you also have access to the specification of how the software works - the source - and if you have or develop the skill to work with that, you can explore for yourself how the technology works. This creates an openness in prospects that is impossible with closed, proprietary software. Open source projects also welcome contributions to their documentation (or other pieces of their project) as your abilities develop and as a way of developing your abilities.
With that perspective as background, Drupal is very well documented online and in books (as are Leaflet and the other web site components I use: PostgreSQL, PHP, Apache web server), although as with any open source project, keeping documentation up to date is always a challenge. You sometimes may have to read web forums in addition to the published documentation to get a current view of the features and behaviour of the software.
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