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maryg117's picture
Posted by maryg117 on July 13, 2009 at 3:24pm

Can anyone point me to some help in plain English? I work with a bunch of men and recently took on the responsibility to create a teacher website directory in Drupal. I feel a little lost in the "nodes." I don' t want to keep going back to the guys with my questions as they think it means I can't do this job. I just need some clear guidance for creating a template that teachers can use to make web pages.

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Beginning Drupal site

Posted by tracy_pilcher on July 13, 2009 at 5:43pm
tracy_pilcher's picture

Hi Mary,

Drupal can do some pretty amazing things just out of the box. With a standard install you can provide blogs, forums and story pages. From an administration standpoint, you can control who can be a member of the site, and what content they can access.

For general start up and installation information you should start at the drupal handbook pages:

http://drupal.org/handbooks

What functionality do the teachers want? Will creating blog articles and forum topics cover what they want to do? If not Modules are your friend.

http://drupal.org/project/Modules

http://drupalmodules.com/ This is not part of drupal.org but it is a good site to search for modules to do what you need.

For the site appearance you can look at some of the many existing drupal themes.

http://drupal.org/project/themes

There are many other sites which offer free drupal themes as well as theming services, this is just one:

http://www.alldrupalthemes.com/free-drupal-themes

Drupal has a steep learning curve once you go beyond the basics, but there are good learing recources: You should check out the Lullabot site for training materials http://www.lullabot.com and search Amazon for Drupal titles, there are quite a few books out there.

I wish you the best.
Tracy

plain english

Posted by zakiya on July 13, 2009 at 5:49pm
zakiya's picture

I've only been using drupal a bit but if I were you I'd try installing the CCK module. This will allow you to create custom fields like Teacher Name, Schedule, Course Descriptions etc that can be filled in by the teacher if you grant him or her permissions. I haven't yet found a guide that had all the answers but there are some decent video tutorials on the web.

Drupal for Education

Posted by codeknitter on August 13, 2009 at 6:03pm
codeknitter's picture

Hi -- it just occured to me that the Drupal for Education book may be a help: http://drupal.org/node/340820

They've got a nice intro to the basics and walk through using CCK and may have covered a lot of questions you already have. :)