New to Drupal Dojo

First off I wanted to introduce myself, I am Corwin. I am new to the Drupal community. I pretty much locked myself in my office this week and forced myself to learn Drupal. Granted I have not even come close to penetrating the surface of Drupal yet, however I learned a lot so far! When I downloaded Drupal I also went out and purchased a book called Pro Drupal Development, I had already downloaded Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and Wordpress. The second book gave me a pretty good rundown of what Drupal is, even though I had been researching it for quite a while prior to downloading it and getting the books. I really do enjoy the the Pro Drupal book though.

I came from building websites with, phpNuke, phpBB, SMF, Joomla, Xoops, and various other content management systems. To be honest I got tired of every time I built a website I tried a new CMS site every time, again and again I needed something the other CMS site could not provide, or I was just not happy with it for one reason or another. To be really honest I could draw up a fairly long list of reasons why I don't use phpNuke anymore. So anyways I decided I wanted to stick with one powerful CMS site and not switch anymore. So the last few months I have been researching CMS after CMS it came down to Xoops and Drupal. Then I read this review, http://www.iis-aid.com/articles/iis_aid_news/my_drupal_defection and the author made this comment "...but it takes a fairly intimate knowledge of Drupal to be able to get the best out of it..." and I took it seriously. I was not looking for a CMS in a can, as far as ease of use. I wanted something that covered most of what I wanted and anything that it didn't have I would just build myself. So in a nut-shell thats why I choose Drupal.

At first I came to this group looking for a mentor, however I did not realize that this site was a mentor in itself. So I got pretty excited when I started reading through the site. Currently I am downloading your screencast for the tutorial on Jquery, which is really cool. I may not consider myself a guru when it comes to web development or programming however I have always been able to get what I needed done, I suppose now its about time I find something to be a guru in. And Drupal is interesting enough to be just that.

Thanks for putting up a great Drupal group. I look forward to many great lessons.

Corwin