Drupal – The Coding Pad

Master Drupal for Free with NodeOne Video Tutorials

I thought I would take a minute today, take a little detour, and share a resource I’ve discovered recently that is an absolute MUST for anyone who wants to learn and master Drupal. NodeOne is a Scandinavian Drupal shop and they have the most amazing collection of free video and written Drupal tutorials prepared by Johan Falk. Johan is a skilled Drupal-er and an excellent teacher who explains concepts clearly and systematically, and even though I’m quite comfortable working with Drupal I still find myself learning from him. He’s also written a Drupal 7 book – Drupal 7: the Essentials.

So check out the NodeOne Drupal learning library. For the best results, filter by the version of Drupal that you’re interested in and see what pops up. The screencasts are arranged in sets by topic. Here’s a partial list:

Learn Drupal 7 with NodeOne
Taming the Beast – Learn Views with NodeOne
Learn Page Manager
Learn Flag with NodeOne
Learn Content Access
Learn Rules with NodeOne
and more…

Thanks Johan for taking the time to share your knowledge! You should also follow Johan on twitter.

Enjoy 🙂

MODx and Drupal – Some Thoughts

Recently on Twitter I made the comment that I love MODx and Drupal equally. James Rotering from The CMS less traveled found that statement interesting and decided to dig a little deeper. He sent me some pointed and very detailed questions about my thoughts on the two CMSs and the results of that interview are now posted on his blog. These questions were interesting for me to answer because I realized I’ve always taken it for granted that each CMS has a place in my little world and I’ve just gone on blissfully enjoying having these excellent toys available to me and having the freedom to use one or the other. So this was a great opportunity to reflect on and analyze my own short history in web development and to articulate my thoughts and opinions (accurate or misguided as they may be 🙂 ). One wonderful side effect of doing this interview was a renewed appreciation for the developers of Drupal and MODx for sharing their wonderful creations with the rest of us, and for the amazing open source community out there that continues to support, enhance, extend, and make possible things that would otherwise just be a v ery expensive dream for most of us. So thank you all 🙂

Thank you James for the wonderful opportunity to be interviewed on your blog. Be sure to check out James’ other posts, he’s a great writer and I’m looking forward to reading more from him.

Exploring Drupal 7 Alpha 1 – Screencast

Drupal 7 Alpha 1 was released a few days ago, on January 15, 2010. This is an exciting release for the Drupal community and Drupal fans everywhere. Drupal 7 has introduced some exciting new changes in terms of a new admin UI and incorporation of major elements of CCK into the core. In this screencast, we will install the alpha1 version and explore the backend a bit.
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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!

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Gauging User Interest – MODx vs. Drupal

This post was inspired by a conversation on Twitter, where @ShaneSponagle, my buddy and MODx guru extraordinaire 🙂 asked me what my blog stats looked like with respect to interest in MODx vs. Drupal, since I blog about both platforms. What I’m going to present here is a simple, and yet not so simple answer to that question.

Some disclaimers before I start:

I’m not an expert on either platform, I just share what I know and I’m learning
I’m not an expert at statistics or interpreting them
I’m not making any statements about which CMS is “better” or “more popular” than the other
In the grand scheme of things, I’m a small fish and this blog is just a small portion of the web, and so I don’t pretend to represent any global trends

That said, I think there’s some moderately good basis for comparison for three simple reasons:

I am working concurrently on two tutorial sets, one for Drupal and one for MODx
They are both aimed at complete newbies, so the audience is comparable
A lot of my top hits and searched are on posts in either tutorial series, with the exception of two other posts (one on Fedora and the other on splitting CSV files).

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