Win a Copy of the Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide ebook – Blog Contest

I’m excited to announce a new blog contest at the Coding Pad today!! 🙂 In partnership with Dorien Herremans, author of the Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide ebook, we will be running a blog contest focused on building community websites with Drupal.

I’ve been building a series of Drupal beginner tutorials here, but I’m sure you’re itching to learn more, build more, and explore Drupal’s power past the basics. Well, here’s a suggestion for you – build a community website!! How?  By getting and learning, and working along with an excellent book – Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide ebook!! 🙂

Up for grabs are three copies of this awesome ebook that walks you step by step through the process of building a Community Website using Drupal.  I wrote my inital impressions about this book in a prior blog post (Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide Book – Initial Impressions) –  and since then have continued to be impressed by the author’s approach and the content of the book.

How to Enter:

It’s real easy!

Here’s the two-step process to enter this contest:

  1. Visit the author’s contest page and leave your email address.  Your email address will not be spammed, but will be used for notifying the contest winners, after which it will be deleted :).
  2. Then come back to this post and leave your favorite tip on using Drupal for our readers, as well as the first four characters of the email address you left on the author’s page.

You MUST complete these two steps to qualify. At the end of the contest period, Dorien will select three winners at random and send them each a copy of her ebook. 🙂

The contest will run from today till May 15, 2009, so go ahead and enter!!

Also be sure to visit the book website to read more about the book and the Drupalfun website to see what you will learn to build.

Many thanks to Dorien and Drupalfun for sponsoring this contest!

21 thoughts on “Win a Copy of the Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide ebook – Blog Contest”

  1. The best tip I can give is to add new modules slowly and see how each one affects the whole.

    1. This is definitely sound advice. Adding and activating a bunch of modules all at once is not a good idea unless you’ve worked with them often and know their quirks and issues.

      Enabling them one at a time allows you to test how each module affects your website before enabling the next one, and it thus becomes easier to troubleshoot any issues that arise.

      Thanks for your submission. Please don’t forget to include the first 4 characters of the email address you entered at the Drupalfun contest page. 🙂

      Looking forward to more tips!

  3. My biggest help in using drupal was to get plugged into the community, specifically irc. Download an irc client, connect to irc.freenode.net, join the #drupal-support chatroom, and listen to what goes on.

    Also helpful was learning to use the handbook and the issue queue’s for each module (hint: load up the module’s project page and then click on “Search issues” near the bottom of the page) has connected me more into the community.

    (My first 4 character are roge 🙂

    1. Roger,

      Thanks for your entry and for the tip. Yes, plugging into the community is a must for anyone who is serious about learning Drupal and using it to its full potential. Joining or following the irc discussions is one great way to do this, and you can get help quickly for your questions, and see what people are doing with Drupal. It’s a great way to learn and to keep your pulse on the community.

      thanks much Roger! 🙂

    1. RodG

      Yes! This is very important! I’ve addressed the issue of not using superuser (user 1) for routine admin tasks or for adding content in my tutorials as this user has privileges that can unfortunately cause you to do unintended damage to your website. Always create another admin account for yourself and only use the superuser account for major admin tasks.

      Creating test users for roles is also crucial as it will allow you to test your permissions and see how the website functions for each role you’ve created.

      Excellent tips!! Thanks 🙂

  5. Maintain a list of when you updated each module, including version numbers.

    email els.

  6. The tip I would give to Drupal users is using any of the default bundled themes as an administration theme.
    Administration is super important and if you want/need to have absolute control over your system, there’s nothing better like a Garland admin theme to set you straight.

    1st 4 email letters: jose

    1. Jose

      Ah yes, I do remember when I was quite new to Drupal I enabled some themes that would completely mangle my admin page!! Setting Garland to always be your admin theme is a good idea

      Thanks for the excellent tip! 🙂

  7. As always, don’t forget to install Pathauto (http://drupal.org/project/pathauto), one of the modules that a decent Drupal site can’t live without. Pathauto renders all those node/xxx, “ugly”, meaningless urls to urls that you understand what they’re about (eg. page/my-latest-drupal-book-review is surely much much more readable than node/123…).

  8. My favorite tip is about creating a customized drupal theme. You can use http://www.artisteer.com to create drupal themes (both drupal 5 and drupal 6). You still have to tweak a li’l after you get the ready theme. Here’s what I put together in about an hour with artisteer. It’s valid XHTML and CSS theme. You can download it from drupal.org here http://drupal.org/project/ChaiGaram . I just had to make couple of changes to CSS files and it just works.

    It is not perfect but it will give you a very good start.

    My first four characters are mryt . Thanks

      1. that’s good to know Dorien. Please file any issues you encounter when using the theme so that I can improve it.

        Thanks,

      2. Hey Dorien

        thanks for stopping by, and for sponsoring this contest. We’re getting some awesome tips! 🙂

    2. myrt

      Thanks for the tip. Nice theme! 🙂

      I haven’t used Artisteer yet, I’m trying to roll out my own theme from scratch 🙂 but will definitely give this a look.

      mary

  9. Updates are a given in Drupal! When updating always follow the instructions. Back-up, Back-up, Back-up! Don’t forget to run update.php.

    Email left: stie

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