How to spot a Drupal site | Halfnote

How to spot a Drupal site

There is a growing number of Drupal-based websites out there. The latest and greatest I came across is www.whitehouse.gov, nothing less than the official website for the President of the United States of America.

I have noticed that I sometimes, probably out of curiosity, check whether a website I'm visiting has been built with Drupal or something else. So, how do you know whether a website is a Drupal site or not? There are a few tell-tale signs that you can spot in the HTML markup in a Drupal site. Theoretically the website developers could have created something that uses the same HTML elements without Drupal, but the likelihood of that is rather slim.

The main weapon I use is the Firefox browser along with the brilliant Firebug plugin. If you develop (or just analyse) websites and you don't have this tool, then just GET IT! It is of course possible to view the entire HTML source of the page in any browser, but that is normally quite painful.

So, you have your weapon ready with the safety catch off - what's next? I always start checking the front page of the website. Right-click somewhere in the website and select "Inspect element" in the Firefox/Firebug context menu. Start by taking a peek at the <HEAD> element. Quite often you would find a reference to one of Drupal's standard Javascript libraries somewhere in this section. If you find a reference to drupal.js, then you're done - it is indeed a Drupal site!

I have seen examples of sites where this reference is not there. One example of this is the www.whitehouse.gov website, where they apparently use some more hairy (and probably very clever) handling of Drupal-related javascripts. The next place I would look is in the body tag of the front page. Drupal gives the developer a number of CSS classes for free which are extremely handy for the theme development. In most Drupal websites, the body tag will include classes such as front (or not-front), no-sidebars (or one-sidebar or two-sidebars), not-logged-in (or logged-in). If you spot these, then you have either stumbled right across a Drupal website, or the website developers had a very lucky shot using some other tool (about as likely as Elvis being elected as the new president in Iran).

You might see a front page which does not appear to be built using Drupal. Does that mean that the site is then a non-Drupal site? Not necessarily. These days, what appears to be one single website to the user may actually be a set of websites at the bottom. One example of this is www.jquery.com, the official home of jQuery - the best Javascript invention ever. The front page does not even look like a suspect for being a Drupal site. However, if you trawl a bit further into the site and click on the "plugins" menu option, then you land in plugins.jquery.com, which definitely and undeniably is a Drupal site.

Good luck in your hunt for Drupal sites! If you do come across something that we should list in our collection of Drupal reference sites, then drop us a line using our contact form