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.

Drupal has rich facilities for indexing and searching content, allowing you to create or use existing "views" that help you to filter and find data based on, for example, text matches, date ranges, keywords and tags.

Adding a geographic component to information allows you to also consider and view your data spatially. In fact, in Drupal terminology, a map is simply a geographic view of a set of entities in your database.

As referred to in the discussion of this site's data model, Drupal includes a flexible user model complete with fine grained control of who can or can't create, edit or see any particular type of data that has been created on your site.

This project and site are built around Drupal, an open source content management system that is well supported by an active online community of users and developers. Drupal is  widely used for blogging, e-commerce, online collaboration and many other content-rich applications. The site viewing and editing interfaces are based on familiar web page and form models and the administration facilities are a combination of web interfaces and other common management interfaces (e.g., cPanel or command line).

For this site, Drupal has been installed behind a web server with PostgreSQL. For Drupal system requirements, including the recommendations for web server, database and PHP requirements, see System Requirements.

This site demonstrates a set of Drupal packages that enable the collection and display of geographic information. The map on the home page shows two content types, each containing a geographic location, that are managed by this demo system and then fed into the home page Leaflet map as separate streams of GeoJSON data (more about that below) and mapped as distinct layers.

This site is a bundling of Drupal core, modules (with software fixes for some of those) and includes a custom mapping theme for use as a geographic data collection platform to be used in community-engaged teaching, collaborative data collection and for creating geographic narratives, among other possible uses.