Outline for Drupal 7 Site Building quick start guide

The Docs Team has put in a proposal to attend the Google Summer of Code Docs Summit/Sprint in October 2011. This conference includes a sprint, and we decided that we would propose building:

A quick start guide to building a Drupal 7 site (with core Drupal and contributed modules), which we've identified as a missing piece in our official Drupal documentation. (We had a beginner's suite building guide for Drupal 5, which was updated somewhat for Drupal 6, but it has issues and needs to be totally rethought.) This new quick start guide would use a fictitious company web site as an example, and go through all of the steps necessary to build a Drupal site (after the initial installation of Drupal -- we already have good documentation on that part). We would then link to this quick start guide from our Drupal documentation home page, and from other pages on Drupal.org (our intent would be for this to live on-line on drupal.org, and to be a fairly prominent piece of documentation, maintained going forward in new versions of Drupal).

What I'd like to do here is make an outline, so we're ready to get to work on this when we arrive (if our proposal is accepted).

Notes

These were taken from the discussion on http://groups.drupal.org/node/161644, in no particular order.

Issues with current cookbook

• Current "cookbook" guide for D5/6: http://drupal.org/documentation/customization/tutorials/beginners-cookbook
• Title - shouldn't be "cookbook" but rather "tutorial" or "quick start guide"
• Hard to find on the Docs landing page
• Mixes user guide, tutorial, and reference, should link out to existing reference materials
• Too much about what not to do, should concentrate on what to do instead
• See http://drupal.org/node/1011470 (issue)

Structure ideas for new guide:

[jhodgdon] I'm thinking that this should be DITA structured, and maybe form the first topics for the new help.drupal.org? So if we introduce concepts, we make concept topics, and if we demonstrate tasks, we make task topics. I'll be expanding on this idea shortly...

Content ideas for new guide:

• Use a coherent example of a web site for a single fictitious company as a guiding principle
• Drupal 7 only
• Concentrate on the core objectives and avoid talking about common problems, tips and tricks, etc.
• Don't include migrating content - just concentrate on building a new site from scratch
• (Lee): It might be useful to think of the chapters in terms of major objectives, for example:
  -- The first things to do after installing Drupal
  -- Installing and configuring the most common modules (Views, etc.)
  -- Downloading a contrib theme and making some changes to it
  -- Creating some interactive features like forms and reports.
  -- Managing users and content
• See http://drupal.org/node/1053484 (issue)

Title Suggestions

• Site Building in Drupal 7: A Quick Start Tutorial for Beginners

Outline

1. About this tutorial: who it's for, what it does and doesn't cover, what you need to get started (installation and username/password) etc.
2. First steps: Logging in to your site, a bit about navigation, changing your password, setting the name of the site etc.
3. (etc.)