The open source content management platform Drupal is powerful enough off the shelf, but the ease with which you can add extra modules and the flexibility that capability offers make it even more powerful.

Drupal, the popular CMS platform, doesn't just allow you to create and manage content. You can also set up reporting options to find out more about how your site is being used and visited. Data on user access, content creation, user interaction, and other metrics can help you to modify your site to provide a better experience for users. Reports also support you in assessing how well you're meeting your goals for the site. Let's set up some basic reporting in Drupal 7, and see how to use the View and Google Analytics modules to get more report data.

It's easy to get started with the search server Apache Solr and the popular CMS platform Drupal, as described in our previous tutorial on setting up Solr 4.2 with Drupal 7. Straight out of the box Solr handles basic text searching, but you can increase its power by adding faceted search – the ability to filter on specific facets or aspects of the data on a site. For example, on a Drupal site you might want to be able to filter your searching by author, date, or tags. Solr's faceted search allows users to combine this type of filtering with text searching to find the information they're after faster. Read on for the lowdown on setting up and configuring basic faceted search using Solr 4.2 and Drupal 7, running on Apache on Linux.

Solr is an open source search server based on Apache Lucene. Lucene provides Java-based indexing and a search library, and Solr extends it to provide a variety of APIs and search functionality, including faceted search and hit highlighting, and handles Word and PDF document searching. It also provides caching and replication, making it scalable, robust, and very fast.

For years, MySQL has been the king of open source database servers. It powers a large part of the web and numerous applications worldwide. However, concerns about the future of MySQL since its acquisition by Oracle, combined with an increasing demand for performance and scalability, have driven people to consider alternative options, such as PostgreSQL and MongoDB. Switching to either of those alternatives, however, is not a simple proposition. MariaDB, by contrast, offers enhanced performance in a DBMS that can be a drop-in replacement for MySQL.

One of the challenges of working within today's enterprise space is trying to juggle a multitude of web applications to handle all of your company's needs. You may be able to meet a significant number of those needs with a single application: Alfresco. This enterprise content management portal uses multiple software packages to provide document management, web content, records management, and general collaboration.

When people think about deploying an open source web ecosystem, they often choose Linux, along with Apache, PHP, and the MySQL database. However, MySQL isn't the only mature and feature-rich open source option; rival PostgreSQL can be an equally good choice. While the two are both relational databases, they differ when it comes to implementation details. But don't worry – if you know how to manage MySQL, you can learn how to handle PostgreSQL fairly quickly.

Drupal is a hugely popular content management system, but for all of its flexibility and power it's missing a key component: an easy way to manage image galleries. If you need to create and manage image galleries in Drupal, here's an easy approach that won't cost too much of your sanity.

PHP's prominence as the web development language continues to be incredibly strong, thanks in large part to a worldwide community of developers who contribute to popular PHP-driven projects such as Drupal, Joomla, Magento, and Zend Framework. Corporate backing is similarly strong, with global businesses such as Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft ranking among the high-profile contributors which help to further solidify PHP's status as the world's most popular open source web development language.

With its vast number of plugins, Drupal can be used to build many different kinds of websites, from simple blogs to photo journals to corporate websites. Managing all of these different kinds of websites with Drupal's graphical management interface can become a bit of a chore, because while a GUI makes it easy to pick the tasks and options you want, it doesn't let you run them quickly. That's where Drush, a Drupal command-line shell, makes a Drupal administrator's job easy. Drush can make it easy for you to perform an internal cleanup, do a fresh Drupal install, install and enable modules, or create users, among other things.