Hello everyone,
My name is Patrick Grady and I am not only brand new to the Drupal Dojo group, but am also a brand newbie to Drupal!! I have 10+ years experience with GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and have recently decided that I am ready to start exploring a new career path. A friend of mine has a business which revolves around web development using Drupal for client companies. He gave me the run down on what he does and it sounds very cool. My goal is to be able to work remotely and feel as if working with Drupal will allow me to create that reality for myself.
Any advice/insight for a newcomer to Drupal will be greatly appreciated!! For starters, where to now? I watched a preliminary video on Drupal and am hooked! I'd appreciate some steering into the best direction to get my skill set up to scratch. So, fire away with some of your advice/insights as to where I should head from here (online courses, books, jump into Drupal Gardens headfirst.....)
Regards,
Patrick Grady
Comments
Books are a way
There are many very good books on Drupal. I've gone through a couple from APress including Beginning Drupal 7, which, as it says, is for people new to Drupal. O'Reily also has a very good book called Using Drupal if my memory is working. There's the original version dealing with Drupal 6 and just out a new one on Drupal 7.
If books less your thing, there are lots of videos on the web. Search NodeOne and this Swedish company has a variety of videos on Drupal including a broader explanation of what it is as well as detail. I'm sure you can find others by searching.
I can't believe I left out drupal.org - they've got info and tutorials, these groups and lots of documentation.
Robin Alexander
alexande.robi@eagle.uwlax.edu
I'm super biased because I
I'm super biased because I work for the company, but if you're really new to web development and the resulting issues with hosting, server maintenance - and you want to focus on the end-goals, or business-goals of clients rather than logistics, a great way to get started quickly is start making sites with DrupalGardens.com. You can either continue to host them there, or download them for developing elsewhere.
I know this sounds like spam, but honestly, if I didn't work for them, I'd be developing sites for small clients on drupalgardens.com. I absolutely don't like maintenance, upgrading, etc. In bigger companies, it's handled by specialist teams. So anyway, I think it's so nice to just be able to pay a reasonable price for someone else to handle that stuff so you can focus on the business/strategy side.
Also, I made a super fast 4 part tutorial about Views. You don't have to use DrupalGardens to do that! But it's all put together there (with the selection of contributed modules).
http://www.drupalgardens.com/content/new-views-tutorials-4-part-intro
http://drupalize.me/ has free and paid videos
http://dev.nodeone.se/ has a whole bunch of free videos.
Welcome and best wishes!
I second the Drupal Gardens suggestion
I wish I'd known about Drupal Gardens before. I just looked at it as a result of this post and it looks like an excellent way to get your feet wet with Drupal without having to make a lot of decisions up front. The installation is slightly enhanced to make navigating the backend a little easier and clearer and the initial suggestions for modules is a good solid core for what most folks will need.
You can get a site up in minutes and play around and then do some research to find what you need to add to get it to your liking. I plan on using it to test and get familiar with new features before I move them to my "real" sites.
And, of course, you can just upgrade from the free account and use your own domain name and host your sites there if you want.
Beginner Resource List
If you like to explore, check out the Beginner Resource List on Listology
http://www.listology.com/jwalling/list/drupal-beginner-resources