New to Drupal, trouble with organization

Hi Allie, and welcome. I'll give it a shot --

Content Types &c.

The main units of content in Drupal are 'nodes'. A node is a discrete piece of content, similar to a page or post in other CMS's. The awesome bit about nodes is that you can subtype them and add all sorts of fields to make the structure look the way you want for the content you need to store and display, much more useful than a title and a textarea. These node types are called 'content types'. Drupal usually comes with 'page' and 'story'. You can add more at /admin/content/types. To extend your node-type to have more than just title and body, you'll need CCK (content construction kit) if you're running Drupal 6. CCK lets you add whatever fields you want to a content type. In Drupal 7, the functionality of CCK has been added to core, so you don't need an extra module (though you will probably need to add some for field types). Here's a sort of Drupal-content-basics: http://drupal.org/documentation/modules/cck.

Drupal does a really good job of separating content from presentation, so your node-types will typically reflect more what type of information your node contains than how it should looks.

Other content-y things in Drupal that are not nodes include blocks (usually something like a callout, displayed in sidebar, header, or footer), users, and taxonomy (vocabulary and tagging, attached to nodes). You can create lists of nodes or other pieces of information with the views module, which is a fairly-powerful querybuilder with a gui. Panels is a tool that lets you create complex page layouts with arbitrary pieces of content in them (nodes, blocks, views, etc.).

Themes

You should only need one theme, and a Zen subtheme is a great place to start. The theme will define regions for block-content. You can theme each content-type separately, too, using template files.

The two biggies are page.tpl.php, which defines the page layout (and typically contains your block regions) and node.tpl.php, which defines the layout and display of all node content. Usually the node (and the stuff in node.tpl.php) displays in the $content area of the page.tpl.php file, so page templates are more top-level and node templates theme the stuff inside the content area.

You can override the node.tpl.php for a particular type by creating a node-[my_content_type_name].tpl.php file.

If you have very different layouts (like changing top-level layouts, rather than just stuff moving around in the node-content area) you can route different pages or different node-types to overridden page templates in template.php (creating multiple page-[some new page type].tpl.php files). You can tell the theme which template to use based on a condition in [mythemename]_preprocess_page -- add the new template to the $vars['template_files'] array.

I hope this is at least sort-of helpful. There's a lot to grok at first with the way drupal handles content and display. I don't really know if this is helpful or just a brain-dump for me, so if you're looking for something more specific try to rephrase, and don't hesitate to ask.

There are tons of great, free drupal videos and tutorials on the web, just google around. Anything by Lullabot (http://www.lullabot.com/), DrupalEasy (http://drupaleasy.com/), and Mustardseed (http://mustardseedmedia.com/podcast) tends to be pretty good, but that's by no means an extensive list.

learnbythedrop.com does a lot of video tutorials that might help. also Lin Clarks site is great lin-clark.com

Hi -

I'm a yinzer (though a fairly recent one, only moved to Pittsburgh 4 years ago) and not a themer. But I work with a lot of great themers - and all types of Drupalers - at CivicActions. I'll be in and out of the booth during the conference (leaving for sessions), and am sporting a brown CivicActions shirt and a gray beard. Love to meet all the yinzers who are here and hear about your experiences with Chicago. And Drupal.

=Fen