Hey, everyone. I got to Drupal in a very round-about way as I am not a developer. I am part of a task force at work that created a campaign. Our marketing company designed a basic WordPress site for us but I wasn't comfortable being the administrator, not having built it from scratch and not knowing the exact functionality. Therefore, I created my own WordPress site for the campaign and we went with that. Unfortunately, the dreams I have for the campaign and the website that accompanies it are greater than I feel WordPress will allow me to accomplish. Consequently, I set out in search for an alternative.
I came across Drupal which I feel will allow me to achieve my goals. Problem is, I know nothing about Drupal. I'm currently signing up for lynda.com so that I can utilize their (seemingly minimal) trainings on Drupal and I'm also looking into books to help me learn. I just ordered Drupal for Dummies off of Amazon, simply because it received good reviews and comments. That said, I'll be learning from all of you as well and hope to meet some of you at various events this group might host. If you have any "I wish I knew this when I started using Drupal" stories, please feel free to add them in a reply. Or you can just watch me struggle and laugh maniacally. That works too. :)
Glad to have found the group. I look forward to being active.
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Drupal can fulfill your wildest dreams if you go beyond the admin interface. Manipulating Drupal by learning how to create/use tpl files. That includes block tpls, node tpls, page tpls, views tpls, and pretty much all tpls in general. Learn how to use template.php. Learn how to create a basic module to put custom code in. When a module does not do exactly what you need it to do, or you want to change the look of it, learn how to override it. Learn how to look into the core/contrib modules files to see how they work and what they are outputting, and that you can in most cases copy their tpls and paste them in your theme root for overrides. Learn how to use http://api.drupal.org. Learn Views and its interface. Don't install a module when a simple 1 or 2 lines of code will do the same thing. Learn how to protect update.php and cron. Learn how to use Drush asap. Consider using a grid theme. Panels (and like modules) make it easy to display custom layouts, but it is way way more lightweight to learn how to code your layouts straight into tpls. Those are things I wish I knew when I first started learning Drupal.
http://picxelplay.com
write>read>preview>edit>read>post
That. Is. Awesome. Great
That. Is. Awesome.
Great list. I'll be sure to pay attention to all of those and to seek out the answers to let me know what the hell you just said to me. Hahaha
These all go on my "to do" list. Thanks much!
Also, if anyone knows of meetups that haven't been posted here, i'm interested in attending.