Like many other open source projects, Drupal uses the It will be released when it is ready philosophy.

Drupal stores its information - the individual pages, the registered users, and so on - in the database. The database forms the back-end for your Drupal site. At this time, Drupal supports only MySQL and PostgreSQL.

We understand that not everyone can donate money. However, you can still help is many other ways - coding, writing documentation, testing patches etc. Please read the Contribution Page to find something that interests you.

Thank you so much! Donations are accepted at the Drupal Association donation page. Donations are used for things like improving architecture, helping to organize Drupal-related events, marketing efforts, and so on. Please read the Donation FAQ too.

The Drupal Association Board of Directors handles the day-to-day affairs of the organization, and include the persons holding permanent Association positions of President, Treasurer, and Secretary, as well as the additional positions of Event Manager, Technical Project Manager, Fundraiser, Communications and PR Officer, Association Infrastructure Manager, and Community Infrastructure Manager. Terms for Board of Directors members are fixed at two years for President, Treasurer, and Secretary, and one year for all other positions. The Staff Page of the Drupal Association's official site contains a list of members currently holding these positions.

The Drupal Association is an organization dedicated to helping the open-source Drupal CMS project flourish. It helps the Drupal community with funding, infrastructure, events, promotion and distribution.
To learn more about the Association, navigate to Drupal Association website.

Drupal is an open-source platform and content management system for building dynamic web sites offering a broad range of features and services including user administration, publishing workflow, discussion capabilities, news aggregation, metadata functionalities using controlled vocabularies and XML publishing for content sharing purposes. Equipped with a powerful blend of features and configurability, Drupal can support a diverse range of web projects ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven sites.
You can read more on the About Drupal page.

We've set up a page to specifically answer this question.

Like any other media, backups are essential. From the Drupal site -
If a site's data does not exist in three places, it doesn't exist at all.
Read more about backing up your Drupal site here.

In Drupal 4.7 and 5.x the order in which a module's hooks get called is dependent on the weight of your module in the system table. You can set a low weight (negative number) to get your module to execute before others. Or, you can set a high weight to execute after other modules.
Read more about weights here.

From wikipedia - Sandbox is an online environment in which code or content changes can be tested without affecting the original system.
New features and modules are demonstrated best in a sandbox. You may use demo module to setup a demonstration site.

Yes, you can use drush -

Read more about drush at its project page.

Lately, many books on Drupal are being published. You can find an incomplete list here.
Also try searching in your favorite online bookstore.

There are some unofficial scripts which are available for this task. However, please note that we cannot provide support if something messes up.
The script is located here.

Many can be found at the Drupal Videocasts page. Thank you to all the contributors who created the videos!

It is impossible to single out each site that uses Drupal.. However, you can find a partial list here.

You can use the issue tracking system of Drupal. To file new issues, go here.

There is a Best Practices guide which you should follow.

Various options are available - read the Drupal Support page to find out more.

There is a guide for this purpose.

You can read the API online at the API Reference page.

It is hard for us to give an unbiased reply to that :)
However, recently a lot of articles have been written for comparing CMS'. Use your favorite search engine. You can also try CMSMatrix.
Also, here is an article comparing Drupal specifically with Joomla.

It is recommended that you run the most current stable release. This can always be found at the Drupal Project page. However, if there are no compelling features in the latest version, a contrib module that is important to you isn't ready or you don't have time, there is no need to rush your upgrade as long as security updates are available for the version you are running. For more information, refer to the Version info page.

All supported releases are available on the Download page. In general, however, you should download the latest version. Read the next question if you need help in figuring out which version to download.

Drupal is pretty light on system resources, being based on PHP. The only restriction currently is on the database - you must use either one from MySQL or PosgreSQL. You can check the detailed system requirements here.

Welcome to the Drupal community! The best starting point for new users is the Drupal Handbook.

This page is merely hard-coded links and definition lists. A more dynamic solution is FAQ module. It provides a flexible and full-featured solution for frequently asked questions.

There is a fantastic guide here.

The views module provides a flexible method for Drupal site designers to control how lists of content (nodes) are presented. Traditionally, Drupal has hard-coded most of this, particularly in how taxonomy and tracker lists are formatted.
You can read more about it at its project page.
A tutorial is available here.

Yes, there is a module specifically for that.

Multiple Domains is a module which allows you to span one site across multiple domains.
You can read more about it at its project page.

Drupal includes built-in methods for implementing JavaScript. You can read more about it here.

CCK stands for Content Construction Kit. As the community says, CCK is the best thing to come along since the doughnut.
It allows you to create custom content types for a site without having to code them yourself, and it has a plethora of add-on modules to handle different types of fields.
You can find more information at the CCK project page.

Yes! The news aggregator is a powerful on-site RSS news reader that can gather fresh content from news sites and weblogs around the web and make it available from your site.
You can read more about it at home page of aggregator module.

AutoPilot is a deployment platform for Drupal, designed specifically to take the work out of day-to-day build management for the Drupal CMS.
To read more about the Autopilot project, refer to the Autopilot Project Page.

The akismet module allows you to use the Akismet web service to protect your site from being spammed.
For more information on this module, read the project page of akismet.

Acidfree Albums is a full-featured media management system for Drupal. You can use it to easily manage your photos and videos with Drupal.
For more information on this module, visit the Acidfree Albums project page.

.install files used to do module setup work. A .install file is run the first time a module is enabled, and is used to do setup required by the module.
The most common task is creating database tables and fields (which prior to version 4.7 was done manually). .install files are also used to perform updates when a new version of a module needs it.
We have set up a page specifically for this file.

.info files used primarily by the modules administration system for display purposes as well as providing criteria to control activation and deactivation. This file is required for Drupal 5 to recognize the presence of a module.
For more information, read the .info page.

A module is a collection of functions that link into Drupal, providing additional functionality to your Drupal installation.
There is a tutorial available, on the topic Creating Modules.
After reading this tutorial, you will be able to create a basic block module and use it as a template for more advanced modules and node modules.

Please do not paste lots of code directly into the channel - it disrupts the flow of conversation. Please use one of the many pastebin services - a nice one to use would be DrupalBin.

If someone doesn't answer in #drupal-support, your next avenue for support is the Drupal forums.

Of course, you are welcome to join us on IRC. You will find here a list of Drupal IRC Channels where we hang out on #drupal at freenode.
#drupal is for all questions about code and also about everything pertaining to drupal.org and the Drupal community at large (advocacy, marketing, infrastructure etc.)

Please DO NOT do that. Hacking core means that you won't be able to upgrade your site without losing your changes. You will probably develop strange bugs that we can't fix. You're better off using the hooks system and theme overrides.

Zen is the ultimate starting theme for Drupal 5. If you are building your own standards-compliant theme, you will find it much easier to start with Zen than to start with Garland or Bluemarine. This theme has lots of documentation in the form of code comments for both the PHP (template.php) and HTML (page.tpl.php, node.tpl.php).
You can read more about Zen at its project page.

Drupal often gets criticized by newcomers who believe that object-oriented programming (OOP) is always the best way to design software architecture, and since they do not see the word "class" in the Drupal code, it must be inferior to other solutions. However, the design decision was made for a number of reasons, you can read more about this issue.

Sure! You can read about it at the the doxygen coding guidelines page.

Yes - The Drupal Coding Standards. Please follow them carefully when submitting any code for inclusion in Drupal project.

You can checkout the code from Drupal CVS repository. Read the CVS Handbook for more info.
A quickie to check out the head -
cvs -z6 -d:pserver:anonymous: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it :/cvs/Drupal checkout Drupal

The software itself is completely free, under the terms of GPL. However, the name Drupal is a registered trademark.
From Dries' own site -

Rest assured that this change is intended only to prevent the 'Drupal' name from being used out of context by overly aggressive entities. Most of you who use Drupal, commercially or otherwise, need not worry. This change will only help ensure that the effort of all the hard working Drupal contributors isn't misappropriated.

You can read more about it at Dries' blog.

We use the GNU GPL license, version 2.
It is the license that applies to Drupal, as well as any modules and theme engines.