What are Tripal & Drupal

Both Drupal and Tripal provide the framework for your site. Drupal is a content management system which provides edit an advanced administrative form for managing your site. For example, when you change the look and feel of your site or add basic pages, that is Drupal making your life easier! Tripal extends Drupal to provide support for biological data. For example, when importing and displaying biological data, that is Tripal at work.

Drupal

Drupal is designed to be the perfect content management solution for non-technical users who need both simplicity and flexibility. It accomplishes this through a modular approach to site building. Unlike other CMS’s, Drupal isn’t a prefabricated toy truck, but rather a collection of wheels, windshields, axles, frames, etc., that a toy maker can easily assemble. With Drupal, a maker could create a toy truck, but she or he could just as easily create a toy airplane, submarine, or robot. For this reason, Drupal may be described as both a content management system and a content management framework—one unified system that strives to have the strengths of both, without their deficiencies.

– Drupal.org Official Overview Excerpt

Additional Resources:

Tripal

Tripal is a toolkit for construction of online biological (genetics, genomics, breeding, etc), community database web portals, and is a member of the GMOD family of tools. Use Tripal out-of-the box to create a basic genomics site (with no programming) or customize using Tripal’s Application Programming Interface (API). Tripal is free and open-source (GNU General Public License version 2), allows for extensive customization and is backed by a helpful user community. A strength of Tripal is our community of developers. Customization and extension of Tripal can be created and shared with other sites as modules allowing you to create your own tools and visualizations or leverage those developed by groups around the world.

– Tripal.info Official Overview