Tag: Drupal

Building a Website with Drupal for Newbies – Introduction

As promised in my post on Kings among Content Management Systems, I am creating a tutorial for newbies on how to create a Drupal website. Being a relative Drupal newbie myself, I figured this would be the best way for me to learn and share what I’m learning.

Several things I need to point out before we begin:

  • This is not the first Drupal website I am building, so it’s not trial and error, at the end of this tutorial you will have a functional Drupal website and enough tools and ideas to play with to advance your Drupal knowledge.
  • Why another Drupal tutorial? There are many many Drupal tutorials out there, some really good, some not so clear, so why another one? Well, before I decided to work with Drupal I had read a lot of things about how difficult it was, and about how steep the learning curve was. My first forays into Drupal weren’t very productive, and the tutorials weren’t very helpful. After digging some more I finally started to figure it out, so I decided to create a tutorial as I go, so that people new to Drupal have one more resource to follow.
  • This is a newbie tutorial, at least at it’s outset, so if you’re an expert, you may find it boring, but I welcome any comments and corrections and contributions. But don’t leave, stay and see how this develops, at some point it may be useful to you.

I have several goals in writing these tutorials:

  1. For you to learn how to build a pretty functional website that you can add content to and mold into more, and have the room and capability to expand, which Drupal is very good at.
  2. That after this series of tutorials you’ll go on past your first website to learn more and build more and share your tips and ideas with me and others.
  3. That I will learn more from writing these tutorials and from any questions or issues that may arise as you explore your ideas.

Drupal is currently, as of this writing, at Version 6.0, which was released just recently. However, this series of tutorials is going to cover version 5.7, mostly because version 6 is still very new and not all the modules have been updated yet. You can use version 6 but I can’t really guarantee that everything will work as described in these tutorials.

So what do you need?:

  1. Somewhere to host your new website. You can use a free host and free subdomain if you wish, but if you want this to be a serious project, I suggest that you get a domain name and a hosting plan, because you never know where this project will go. You may end up building something that you want to hold on to and develop! You can try GoDaddy.com Hosting Plans or Hostgator.
  2. A domain name, if you choose to go that route. You can get a cheap .info for starters. You can also choose to build your website on a subdomain of one of your main domains, which is what I will be doing throughout this tutorial.
  3. Drupal, which is free and can be installed using a script installer such as a Fantastico, or manually. I will describe all this in the next installment so don’t worry too much about it at this point.
  4. Inspiration – just look at some of the sample Drupal websites I posted in Kings among Content Management Systems to see what is possible, and to start generating your own ideas. You can also visit http://www.drupalsites.net/ to see an assortment of Drupal sites.
  5. A notebook and pen, if you like taking notes.
  6. Your favorite beverage and some snacks.
  7. A sense of humor.

What don’t you need to bring with you?

  1. Programming knowledge of any kind: While it would be nice to have, and it may come in handy at some points, it really isn’t necessary to bring any programming knowledge to the table. If you need to know something, such as how to create a database for the installation, and you don’t know it, I will either show you how to do it, or point you to a tutorial that explains it in a way that I think is easy to understand.
  2. A pet turtle: I have one, but that doesn’t mean you need one.

So get everything set up, and decide what you want your website to be about, and in the next installment we will start working on building a website with Drupal.

Kings among Content Management Systems

In the world of Content Management Systems (CMSs), there is an array of options and choices so dizzying as to be completely overwhelming for the newbie, and sometimes even for the seasoned programmer or webmaster. These CMSs are capable of so much and they all have different things to offer. One major advantage of using a CMS is the ease with which you can set up and deploy a website! Using a CMS can save you a lot of building time and allow you to concentrate on creating content and marketing your website.

I have tried and played with many free content management systems to see what their different merits are, and have settled on two favorites on the basis of my needs – blogging and building content websites (for which I use either CMSs or hand coding).

For blogging, I definitely consider WordPress to be the master! With a strong community committed to creating themes and plugins, you can do almost anything with WordPress. It’s easy to set up and configure, and to add functionality to. With a little PHP knowledge, you can configure the files and play with them with ease.

For building larger content based websites, I declare that Drupal is King! I haven’t been playing with Drupal for too long, but I’ve been able to build some interesting websites, and have only glimpsed the possibilities. While many argue that Joomla is easier to use and has many more themes available, I am still enamored by Drupal. I will happily sacrifice the beautiful Joomla themes for the functional for the amazing functionality of Drupal. Granted, it’s not the easiest CMS to set up, but once you’ve mastered the basics, you’ll find that the possibilities will whet your appetite for more and more, and there’s an excellent and very helpful community of Drupal users at Drupal.org and all over the web.

In the next few days I will be creating a tutorial to walk you through creating a Drupal website, and will show you the different things you can do. This will definitely be a newbie tutorial of sorts, but will evolve with time as I learn the ropes of more advanced topics. So stay tuned and be sure to subscribe to the blog so that you don’t miss any of the tutorials.

In the meantime, here is a list of impressive websites built with Drupal to get you thinking, and to whet your appetite. While a lot of these websites have been heavily modified and themed, they show you what Drupal is capable of:

Drupal (of course)
BlogHer
Team Sugar
The New York Observer
Tipic
Pando
Best Credit Shop
AdoptionBaby

…and the list continues. If you have or know of any remarkable sites built on Drupal, feel free to share them here. And stay tuned for the tutorials.