Books/Tutorials?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Laurence A. Lee on December 2, 2008 at 6:22pm

Drupal is pretty nice to work with, and I regularly use it as a "starter website" for clients and colleagues.

The only downside is there is "too much" available -- with different Content Types (Blog Pages, Stories, static Pages, Polls, etc.), as well as a feature-rich access control scheme.

You can start out with the default Permissions, and create content as static Pages. Just that alone will yield a decent Content-Managed website in a matter of minutes. From there, you can explore third-party themes to change the look-and-feel, as well as third-party modules to add more functionality -- such as UberCart for doing eCommerce shopping carts.

Chances are, you'll spend more time tweaking a third-party theme to get the Look and Feel you want, more than anything else done in Drupal.

If you are running a Fedora, RedHat, or CentOS system, you might want to install the Drupal RPM, set up a blank MySQL database, and configure Apache to serve up the Drupal site. Otherwise, there are several low-cost Drupal hosts available that handle all the low-level legwork for you.

There is a Drupal 6 book in the works, and I've heard some good things about that effort. Though, unless you're planning on tweaking PHP under the hood, or doing something complex, I don't think you'll need a book or tutorial -- especially if you use a Drupal hosting provider.

And of course, you can always ask questions on this Group. :-)

Permalink Reply by Scott Murphy on December 2, 2008 at 7:04pm

In addition to some of the pointers that Laurence mentioned,smashing magazine's Drupal Developer's toolbox is a pretty good resource for everything related to Drupal. In the end though, drupal.org has some really good tutorials and guides on how to work Drupal.

Books- Pro Drupal Development is a very good book but it is really hardcore and you probably don't want to pick it up unless you plan to build your own modules or customize Drupal.

Videos- http://www.lullabot.com/ has a video about Drupal. I haven't seen it but if you are an audio learner (? someone who learns by listening) you might want to try their video and their podcasts.

Permalink Reply by Luis Rosa on December 8, 2008 at 9:43pm

Hi John,

Try the Dojo at http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-dojo lots of screen casts to get you going, all done by volunteers.
Also, http://drupal.org/planet this is an aggregate of Drupal related rss feeds accross the world, case studies and step by step instructions on creating modules/snippetts, and sites are available. Drupal.org is undergoing a site redesign and its all documented there.