Because of the way Drupal is structured, it is very fexible in adapting to the needs of a wide range of different web sites. Permission to perform various actions such as creating content, writing a comment, writing a blog post and so on can all be assigned to different roles within Drupal, be it the role of an administrative user or the role of a standard user who is logged in. This means we can grant the permissions to contribute and help in managing the content of the web site to the users of the web site.
Many socially-oriented features are included in Drupal "out of the box" (without the need to download extra fles or modules)including:
* Blogs
* Forums
* Contact forms
Collaborative content via the book module and also via permissions allowing users to edit different types of content, such as pages .
Drupal's modular framework , allows new features to be installed at a later time. There are many modules available, which are designed to enhance Drupal's ability to work and act like a social network. It also means that once our site is up and running, we can easily expand it at a later date with new modules to add extra functionality. Such modules include:
* Organic groups
* Extended profles
* Blog themes
* Gravitar
* OpenID
With Drupal being a content management system, we also have the advantage of having our site controlled and managed by ourselves, as is typical of most web sites, while the community can contribute to the other areas.