There are many CMS (content management system) frameworks for building websites, but what attracted me to Drupal is it's ability to manage users and content. The Drupal site (drupal.org) itself is built using the help of many volunteers. If you want a site that has many contributors (a multi-blog site) it's a good idea to start with Drupal. If you want to build a family site, or book club, or recipe sharing site, or any group/community site, Drupal has modules that deal with registration and creating user profiles. The users can be assigned roles that can help restrict how they can interact with the content on the website.

The active Drupal community has contributed many themes and modules that help beautify and extend the functionaltiy of your site. Often new functionality can be added by just installing a new module and filling out forms to configure the functionality and/or following the installation instructions.

If you want to try building a Drupal site, you can try for free, at Drupal Gardens (http://www.drupalgardens.com). No need to worry about finding a hosting service, just create an account and get started. If you want to read about what to expect before trying, see this article from Maximum PC (http://www.maximumpc.com/article/how-tos/how-_build_site_drupal_gardens). A nice feature of trying at Drupal Gardens, if you run into trouble there are people to help you. Another option is to setup your own local server (on your own machine) and download the sources, install it and start to explore. To start reading about installation, see (http://drupal.org/documentation/install).

Like many CMS frameworks, Drupal stores it's information in a database, so that the most current information can be retrieved and displayed dynamically.

The only time you need to touch code is when you need special functionality that isn't in any existing module or you want to create your own special theme. For modifying a theme, you'll need to know HTML and CSS. To modify/create a module, you'll need to know PHP. This is the hard part about building/maintaining/evolving a Drupal site. This true of any framework--to move beyond the basics requires a bit of learning.