Drupal Basics
Posted by Kelvin on 29 Dec 2009 at 05:10 pm | Tagged as: Drupal Kamikaze
Good at coding, but new to Drupal? Follow this series of posts documenting my journey into the world of Drupal.
Why Drupal?
I compared Drupal with Joomla. Consensus on the net is that Joomla is more slick and polished, but Drupal is way more flexible and performant. Lots of big visible sites running on Drupal.
Getting into it
Downloaded and installed fairly simply. As long as you have a LAMP stack, its straightforward.
Recommend using the Acquia Drupal distro instead of stock Drupal. Comes with a bunch of useful modules pre-installed.
Playing around, seems simple enough to create content, pages, etc.
Enable the CCK module and you can create new content types. You can then associate content types with custom fields. Lullabot has the most coherent discussion of what CCK can do.
Module Mayhem
The next phase is the inevitable foray into the world of Drupal modules.
It is overwhelming, chaotic and incredibly frustrating at times.
Nonetheless, its a necessary phase, as one discovers the bewildering plethora of functionality that can be implemented in modules.
Unfortunately, one arrives very quickly at the conclusion that in spite of the module buffet, its really really difficult at times to find a piece of functionality that just works in a smooth user-friendly fashion. A classic example would be a photo gallery. Many many ways to implement this, but none really satisfying, and certainly none I would be willing to use on a regular basis. Same with an event calendar (though I've heard good things about the Open Atrium calendar.