Posted by nlittle685 on July 15, 2009 at 2:50pm
I'm currently working on setting up a Beginners Drupal Tutorial. I would like input on what you all think would have been helpful in the begining, when you were exploring Drupal...
What do you wish you knew about Drupal, when you were first getting started?
Comments
I think the biggest
I think the biggest challenge is equating what one wants to do with Drupal terminology. It's second-nature to Drupal experts, but a turn off to newcomers.
Taxonomy = Categories
Node = Content
CCK = Custom fields/content
Views = dynamic pages and blocks
Blocks
After that, the next challenge is to find modules to build more complicated sites, and how to configure them properly.
Drupal.org seach is worthless
use Google to search for topic on Drupal.org
either via Firefox plugin or by prefacing Google searches with site:drupal.org.
That's a loaded question!
I think the biggest hurdle for me was the terminology, it's not accessible to "traditional" web developers (nodes/blocks/regions/etc.) Once I got those pounded into my brain, it made sense. The book "Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting" by Konstantin Käfer and Emma Hogbin helped a LOT, especially in regards to understanding how Drupal pieces together a website... no longer is the design, content, and organization clumped together in an HTML file, it's separated into nodes, blocks, themes, etc. I had some familiarity with this from using WordPress, but I can see how it would be a total mindshift for others.
I agree with mradcliffe as well, it's important to know WHAT your site needs to do and then figure out HOW it can do that. Learning how to find good/appropriate modules is essential, it's hard to sort through all the options. Personally, I avoid patches and php because I'm not comfortable enough yet and don't want to add extra maintenance after upgrades, so it's been tricky finding modules that do exactly what I need, out of the box.
I'm a big fan of Dries' learning curve, and the comments on it helped me realize I'm just like everyone else (some days I suck, some days I rock): http://buytaert.net/drupal-learning-curve
I never use the drupal.org search, the site is just too horribly organized to be of any use. I use Google for everything. Also, I really wish more documentation was done with traditional screenshots and step-by-step TEXT instructions. So many Drupal tutorials are done with videos, and I hate that. It's too long and tedious to extract the little bit of information I need in order to get something working.
OH! Almost forgot -- a big help when I first started was THIS GROUP. It's so nice having local Drupal developers that I can come to with questions. I still did a LOT of learning on my own, but when I felt stuck/frustrated I put a couple things up for them to help with.
Jeez, I could write a lot about this, I'll try to stop now...
I agree about the
I agree about the terminology. I took me a while to grasp the concepts beyond the words.
My initial stumbling block was that even though I knew Drupal was powerful and adaptable I had no idea how it was powerful or adaptable. The Drupal community points out some wonderful sites using Drupal, but I didn't understand the process of taking the base Drupal install and turning it into something as powerful or interesting as those websites I was seeing. I could see point A (initial Drupal install) and point Z (finished site) but I didn't get the steps in between. I didn't see how they were taking something that looked sort of like a blog and turning it into these major company websites that no longer looked or acted like a blog.
I kept thinking inside my own self-created Drupal box because I didn't understand how Drupal works. I could see that it was powerful, but I didn't get the how to do it part. It stemmed from my initial misunderstanding of how Drupal works. I thought I was just designing from inside the Drupal admin pages and not touching the page.tpl.php or node.tpl.php or adding to template.php or creating modules.
I totally misunderstood that I could hack a theme up any way I felt like. I didn't understand that template files are just that, templates. They are simply the starting point and you can change, delete, hack and bang on them all you want. Part of this is from learning php at the same time as I was starting to be introduced to Drupal.
I'm the type of person where if I can see how something functions then I can better grasp the capabilities and limitations. Drupal was (and still is a bit) a big black box of code. I wish I could see how some of these major sites were built and how they created the functionality they have.
I agree on using site:drupal.org in a Google search to find answers instead of stumbling blindly through thousands of pages or posts in Drupal.org handbooks, groups, or forums. I wish that Drupal had a help-site or FAQ section that laid out all the answers in an indexed hierarchy so I could go in, point to a subject and get my answer, but it just isn't that easy especially when there are thousands of people adding to the knowledge base of Drupal. And to that point I found that quite often the answers I was looking far almost never reside in the initial page or post on drupal.org. Usually the answer is in someone's comment or reply to the original post or page on Drupal.org.
Also, there is a wealth of information on many personal websites. Many people take the time to detail their solutions when they run into an issue. To that point, I also stumbled on trying to find the "right way" to do something especially when I'd find 5 different solutions. Just as there are many ways to catch a fish, there are usually multiple ways of doing the desired task and there isn't necessarily one right way. (But there seems to be several wrong ways and usually your solution is one of those wrong ways according to someone's post on Drupal.org.)