The slogan of the new Drupal website is:

Come for the software, stay for the community

This is the typical process by which people learn that Drupal's ultimate strength is its community, rather than its code base.

Websites are like human beings - any two websites can be very different and do very different things, but under the hood they are 99% the same. Any website (large or small) has very small unique code base, compared to the enormous software stack that it sits upon. Other components in the stack are typically:

Earlier this year Drupal core developers were getting a strange error message while developing Drupal 7:


Fatal error: Exception thrown without a stack frame in Unknown on line 0


This was causing a lot of head scratching because it doesn't provide any information about what caused it.

Drupal 7 uses exceptions more than any previous version of Drupal and this turned out to be the problem.

PHP exceptions are handled in one of two ways: