Digging into Drupal

[Johnnyb]

Hey,

One of my goals for this year is to get Drupal under my belt. I’ve installed and played around with it but having read and really learned a lot from Chris’s ‘Digging into WordPress’, I was hoping there might be a book out there similar in content, but for Drupal.

Does anyone have any recommendations on good, solid resources for learning Drupal? I don’t necessarily want to learn it top to bottom, but rather get a good solid foundation to build from.

Many thanks in advance,

John

[mixxmac]

I just started learning Drupal also. I’ve been watching some good screencasts and learning quite a bit so far. I found these videos/series helpful:
http://nodeone.se/blogg/learn-drupal-7-with-nodeone-part-1-overview
http://nodeone.se/blogg/taming-the-beast-learn-views-with-nodeone
http://nodeone.se/blogg/learn-page-manager-1
http://www.lewistechwebdesign.com/drupal
http://www.archive.org/details/OrganicGroups7

[mixxmac]

@JoshWhite I agree about Joomla! That was the first CMS I learned, but now I can’t see when to use it over WordPress or Drupal.

I was always under the impression that Drupal has a steep learning curve; and Drupal is powerful. And, so far this seems to be the case.

It’s hard to learn about Drupal. It seems hard to find good documentation and tutorials. And, Drupal is complex!

Out-of-the-box Drupal doesn’t do a whole lot. But with the right modules installed, and configured to work with each other, it seems like there’s nothing Drupal can’t do using the back-end. Permissions are really cool. With the right permissions users can do most things from the front-end. Views let you run almost any query against the database to get the results you want to display on a page, etc. It has a module for Workflow that lets you run actions based on events.

Drupal is very powerful! I’m a big fan so far.

[Johnnyb]

Hey @mixxmac, thanks for the links, I’ll check them out when I get a chance!

I’ve been using wordpress for a while and really like what I can do with it, but recently I’ve been approached by clients wanting large, complete CMS powered sites, and as great as wordpress is it currently has some limitations as a fully fledged CMS. So I turn to drupal. I had read that drupal enables you to separate out post/page content more easily, is this true? With wordpress if I display ‘the_content()’ then it’s difficult to separate out that content without using some JS it seems, and even then it’s difficult. One of the main reasons I’m looking to pick up drupal is that I’d read that I can specify types of content within post/page content which enables me to separate it out.

I’ve heard good things about the powerful backend, at work a colleague of mine has even used it to power mobile apps and the like, and so I can also see value in that aspect. If I have a good grasp or wordpress and php in general I’m hoping that drupal won’t be too tricky to adopt.

[mixxmac]

@Johnnyb I think Drupal gives you the ultimate ability to display whatever lists of results you want to show, on whatever page, with whatever content.

Drupal “Nodes” work like post types in WordPress. Nodes are “Content” and can have whatever Custom Fields you want to add to them. Even Users and Comments are Nodes, and are customizable. Then you can query the database using the Views module, and configure the view to return lists of Nodes based on any type of criteria.

It’s hard to get your head around a lot of the concepts needed to understand and use the modules. But, I think you end up doing a lot more back-end configuration, and a lot less coding theme templates.

[mikeinvaldosta]

Hope this response is not too late to be of use.

I use Drupal as a default platform. I agree WordPress is better supported and more user friendly, but Drupal has some inherent advantages in my opinion. Most notably the native use of “roles” and the ability to be very granular with security/access issues, even the ability to assign and revoke roles for periods of time.
I attempt to make my customers’ websites a productivity extension of their brick and mortar/call centers, Drupal does a great job of role management.
For simply displaying information and gathering feedback, WordPress is unbeatable.

In short, both are shining examples of the open source community’s power.

[Author]

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