The first question that many people ask when they hear about Drupal is, "What is Drupal?" The answer can become very complicated. In the interest of being concise I've begun to tell people that Drupal is a publishing system for the web.

With Drupal a single person or many people can publish all sorts of content. The content can include text, audio, video, images. The content can include long dissertations and short blog-style posts. The content can also encompass things like user profiles, ratings and comments.

Once published you can do all sorts of different things with that content, including creating custom lists, galleries or RSS feeds. You can learn how to do all of that in time. But the first concept (and maybe most important concept) to grasp is the fact that Drupal is a publishing system for the web.