As a Drupal newbie, I can tell you I've spent MANY hours reading the forums, Handbook, Comments, etc ---- they are all wonderful but fail to address the most BASIC questions I had as a NEW user ---- How do I prepare a SIMPLE Page and Site????
Everything I've read assumes we know how to actually use Modules and How To make them display data. The typical suggestion and/or response is to "play around with it". Well, if we don't have much direction -- by way of example, it is really difficult to GET STARTED playing around.
In all the hours of reading and searching, within the Configuration and Customization Handbook, under Taxonomy: Categories; Content Mangement, I found a link to this short paper "Drupal and the New Paradigm" http://digitalsolutions.ph/couchkamotereviews/newCMS which helped me to understand the Drugal concept.
At the end of the short paper, it had a link to this article, "The Power of Drupal Categories" http://digitalsolutions.ph/couchkamotereviews/power_drupal_categories which helped me to understand how to actually use a module, how to get the data to display and How To start a simple little site.
I think you can shorten your learning curve substantially by reading these 2 articles BEFORE wading into the handbooks, comments and forums.
Good luck on our adventure!
Sincerely,
Joel
Comments
this book is not bad
this book is not bad too
http://drupal.org/node/54877
i read it. its wonderful. ever part of the drupal is explained in this book
______
www.persia-cms.com
سئو ، طراحی وب ، موبایل ، نرم افزار
users who are not programmers
alisonlee
Thank you, Joel! I'm a user, not a programmer, and am trying to learn how to maintain my site. I've been wading through material that is clearly designed for someone else, trying to find answers to my simple (possibly simplistic) questions. It's so nice to be validated.
Same here
Alison, one nice thing about Drupal is that you don't have to be a programmer unless you want to get really wild and try to make Drupal do something it wasn't designed to do (and there do seem to be some out there who make that their personal mission).
I can program, although I'm very new to php, but I prefer not to. Those days are over, I hope. Sometimes that knowledge makes it a little easier to understand Drupal.
But you and Joel are correct, much of the documentation out here on the web site seems be written for someone who knows the inner workings of Drupal already. I don't, and would prefer to maintain my ignorance. I just want it to work.
I have been seriously considering starting a little "book" on building a web site in Drupal with the emphasis on "I have no idea what I'm doing." Since I just started with 5.1 (and have only been Drupalling for a month), maybe this is a great time. BTW, the only module I personally consider to be necessary is Nodewords (aka Meta Tags). Views is close, but only for someone who can wade through all those arcane documents to figure out what to do (and this isn't me yet).
Now, if you want to see some really skimpy documentation, pick any module at random. Very few tell you enough about what they do to make a reasonable informed decision. And why not require a [working] demonstration before they can post?
Nancy W.
proudly running 3½ sites on Drupal so far
NancyDru
Nancy: I, for one, would
Nancy:
I, for one, would welcome such a book.
Sig: Don't miss the forest for the trees.
Here's Draft #1
Check out my "Drupal Cookbook" at http://nanwich.info/ Feel free to post comments.
I'd eventually like to submit this to the Drupal site.
Nancy W.
proudly running 3½ sites on Drupal so far (ok, 4 now)
NancyDru
Thank you Nancy. Your book
Thank you Nancy.
Your book is quite enlightening.
I am still struggling with Drupal. I believe what I want to do with Coastal Outdoors is on the enterprise level and I am simply not fluent enough in Drupal to "make it happen".
I am unable to understand the menu system and even the taxonomy supposed navigation system.
For example, the site is intended to be divided into a number of primary categories of information with various sub and sub-sub categores for each of the main categories.
The "main" categories are Hunting, Fishing, Camping and Public Lands
Hunting would have it's first subcategory "Big Game". Big Game has many subcategories such as whitetail deer, bear, elk, etc. I have a significant amount of previouls static pages about strategies, management, locations, gear, etc. I wanted to make these static pages new stories or books which would allow users to comment by adding their own experiences and/or critiques of the information. I would hope to be able to add location information where applicable for inclusion in a GMap tpe module which itself would allow people to do graphical, layer filtered searches.
It gets complex quickly, but, I thought while the developers are updating the GMap, Location and Mapbuilder modules, perhaps I could at least begin to flesh out the site. I seem to be prevented from doing that due to my lack of knowledge relative to building the navigation system. Feel free to look at what little I've accomplished at www.coastaloutdoors.com
If you are interested in exploring further, I will be happy to provide you with an administrator's login. If you don't wish or lack the time, I certainly understand.
Thank you again for shedding a great deal of light on the Drupal process with your book. I highly encourage you to continue it's development.
Sincerely,
Joel
Sig: Don't miss the forest for the trees.
Oops
Oops, I forgot to allow anonymous users (Visitors) to post comments. That's fixed now.
I'll start a section on working with menus.
Nancy W.
now running 4 sites on Drupal so far
NancyDru
PS: I didn't see where I
PS: I didn't see where I could create an account in order to comment on http://nanwich.info
Sig: Don't miss the forest for the trees.
Thanks!
Hi Joel, thanks for this. I too have spent hours just trying to get a basic concept understanding, and feel the documentation needs work. There is tons of very useful stuff here, however it can take hours to figure out. I found this piece extremely pertinent"
Understanding the Taxonomy was a group name for Categories, terms.. ect made reading everything much easier. I will be offering my services for documentation as I feel it could be laid out better. I spent almost an hour today to find out jquery is a part of Drupal and not something that needed to be downloaded and installed separately.
Shari
Thank you Shari. Nancy W
Thank you Shari. Nancy W has done a wonderful job so far in this area. I strongly recommend reaching Nancy W. I would not mind helping with "Drupal for Complete Newbies" either. Perhaps together we can decrease the pain and learning curve future newbies.
Sig: Don't miss the forest for the trees.
...
I will mention as I have in many other places that people can build a Drupal for newbies guide in the handbooks. Any registered drupal.org account can create pages. If a section doesn't exist you can create an issue and I will comment on it.
Dangers of off site guides are that everyone of them that has existed (and there are three that I know of) has gone off line and has been lost to everyone.
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
Work In Progress.
I am still working on my book. I have invited some people to view it and give comments - even you are welcome to do so. I have every intent on loading this book up to this web site - hopefully before the Ides of March strikes.
And to head off the issue, There needs to be a "Drupal For Newbies" book that stands out as being that - I do not see anything like that yet.
Nancy W.
now running 4 sites on Drupal so far
NancyDru
Hey Nancy, I tried
Hey Nancy, I tried contacting you through your site but was unable to access the contact page. For crons job another possibility is http://drupal.org/project/poormanscron
I also agree getting something here is important, and I think the way it is developed is the most important. If you want to do something with users it needs to fall under USERS, no matter if it's an image or way to effect roles.
Shari
Thanks, Shari
Thanks, Shari. I noticed in my logs that the contact form was not accessible to visitors; it is now.
I was slightly aware of that module, but really wanted to get it to work "right." It was just a matter of figuring out what my host wanted. But I will add info on that module to my book.
Nancy W.
now running 4 sites on Drupal so far
NancyDru
Steven: I don't disagree
Steven:
I don't disagree that the project EVENTUALLY needs to be onsite.
However, I must agree with Nancy, if such a project is going to be onsite, it needs to be clearly identified as such and differentiated from the "Handbook". Quite frankly, one of the biggest problems I have had, as a newbie and a non-programmer, is trying to piece together information from the myriad of places information is stored on Drupal. I'm certainly not saying that is bad, but, it is BAD for a newbie.
The articles I pointed out at the beginning of this thread and particularly Nancy's work-in-progress assumes we have NO KNOWLEDGE. Each of these is much easier for me to follow. I would truly like to see a work of that sort differentiated to give us complete newbies a way to get started understanding the Drupal concept and how to get a site up and running quickly. It is impossible to "play around" with Drupal when some of us can't even figure out how to get started with a site.
I also saw several references to very basic "canned" sites, but, through all the disjointed reading I did, I can't for the life of me find it again.
I sincerely hope Nancy will continue with the project. ONCE it is reasonably completed and IF it is differentiated, it would be wonderful to have it onsite. If it isn't differentiated, it will just become one more of the many, many places a newbie has to search to begin to "see the light".
My signature says "Don't miss the forest for the trees". Well, in the instance of Drupal, I can't see the "forest" because I'm lost in the trees. There are so many "paths" I don't know which to follow to find my way.
Again, I think Drupal has many qualities and is a powerful CMS and am in no way being critical of the work of a great any wonderful developers. It is just that as a newbie, I need to crawl before walking, walk before running, and run before soaring into the heavens that Drupal can deliver.
Sig: Don't miss the forest for the trees.
...
We get this a lot. Over and over.
People seem to think that we're not going to allow anything to happen and that we're out to stamp down on change so they write these long posts like this to educate me and help me 'understand'. It's really weird to me. This isn't new. You'll see very similar conversations in my tracker over the last several years.
My point that I've said before is that every single one of these off site efforts is gone. Missing, off line, abandoned. I do not want to see that happen again. I truly do understand your perspective. It's just that no one with the time or inclination has contributed such documentation to drupal.org. Every time I ask, someone educates me and they go ad to the off site content and then that site disappears. I have begged and pleaded with people to help contribute exactly this type of information.
Every single member of the doc team is a random volunteer and contributor just like you. Ten of them were added two weeks ago.
nancyw is a new comer to our community and it's been great seeing her beating me and some of the other regular forum contributors to giving accurate answers and having fun at the same time. It's good for me because it means that more people are getting helped. It means one more person stuck around becoming an avid contributor and helping people with their first steps in Drupal-land. Getting people to help support others here is my biggest goal and documentation that answers repeated questions means less of those questions asked or better references to point new people to.
One new person, Karlied has done a tremendous job re-writing the contributing guide and I think the other new doc folks have been more then a little shocked at how easy it's been to 'just do things'.
Hint: Site recipes but it only gets what people contribute.
I'd like to point out that I don't know php so that would make me 'not a developer'. :D
-Steven Peck
-Documentation team lead
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
Steven: I applaud your
Steven:
I applaud your efforts and I sincerely understand your frustrations. I began www.coastaloutdoors.com 8 or 9 years ago. It was tremendously difficult in the late 90s, particularly in the "fishing" world, to get people to contribute their "secrets". As the years have passed, we now have over 500,000 page views per month with many contributors. My latest hobby "project" is to gather information with a focus on presenting that information from a geo graphical search perspective. It will probably take years for people to begin to provide useable information and perhaps even longer for me/us to figure the most intuitive method of presenting that information for the target audience.
You say I agree with you completely. I read many, many posts from newbies like myself crying out in the wilderness.
That being the case, with everyone acknowledging the target audience of "complete newbies", wouldn't it make sense to have a Newbie Handbook which presents Drupal from the "newbie" perspective? From my perspective, it would be important to HIGHLIGHT things such as Site recipes.
That being said, I believe one of the things which has contributed SO much to my confusion is the fact that Drupal is in beginnings of the radical 5x change. The instructions in most of the posts provide navigational information such as Administer>>Settings where that workflow doesn't appear to exist in the 5x version.
Since many of you have been working with the documentation for significant periods of time (thank you) I suspect you would be better experienced to provide guidance on the Newbie and 5x issue. I think, were I directing this effort, I would seek out complete newbies and ask that they at least serve as advisors or perhaps a sounding board for the Newbie Guide. It MAY help if there were a forum specifically devoted to Newbies or, as I've seen in other posts "Drupal for Dummies" type presentation.
If there is going to be a Newbie guide, perhaps those willing to participate could at the least, point out the differences in instructions from 4x to 5x.
Sig: Don't miss the forest for the trees.
Progress is being made
RJ, sepeck has contacted me and we are in the process of moving my book up to the Drupal site. Please be patient a few more days (I have a busy weekend ahead).
I like the idea of newbie advisors, perhaps adding a few "seasoned" advisors to help keep errors from creeping in.
Another "project" I'm looking at is my take on the posted challenge to produce a small corporate brochure site. I'll try to keep detailed notes on what I do and why. Perhaps that would be a more pointed example.
Nancy W.
now running 4 sites on Drupal so far
NancyDru
I couldn't agree more. As I
I couldn't agree more.
As I attempt to work on developing the geo graphical presentation, I will keep notes and try to contribute in that manner.
Thank you for your efforts, and, thank you sepeck for following up on the Newbie Perspective.
Sig: Don't miss the forest for the trees.
..
One quick reference for you on the corporate brochure style site is this thread http://drupal.org/node/31896 which has several different ways to achieve the objective depending on the end goal. That should help you tailor your site to your clients needs and further the flexibility of Drupal is both it's strength and it's learning curve.
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
Deleted by Author
Deleted by Author
What Drupal is lacking
It may be be somewhere but I couldn't find it. What was very frustrating with Drupal is there is no clear way of how to quickly get going with making simple content. Rather, once you install Drupal the endless searching begins, usually ending up in Google. I think a quickstart sheet for a few basic operations will be the greatest thing so a new comer can make a working page right now. How to post simple content, how to make a menu item and connect it to the blocks ETC. step by step, especially for something like the category module.
With a few basic things explained step by step, one can get a very clear picture of what's going on and have fun too.
Just what I've found.
I invite you...
Gray, I invite you to view my book, referenced above, and see if it's what you're talking about, or close to it. Comments and contacts are enabled, so feel free to leave feedback. We will be putting it up on the Drupal web site shortly.
Nancy W.
now running 4 sites on Drupal so far
NancyDru
I like my method...
...jump on in and start "pushing buttons"...then see what happens. Repeat often. It's how I learned how to hand code html in the first place. Who needs directions?:D
Of course, not all people learn things best this way. I just find it enjoyable.
LOL
That's my favorite method. But some people like a "cookbook" approach, so that's why I started this book.
Nancy W.
now running 4 sites on Drupal so far
NancyDru
For me personally, I know
For me personally, I know what it is I want to do. How do I go about doing it? LOL finding that information has led to HOURS of reading, and not really find the answer. It also means I've downloaded and installed 40 modules and I don't know if I even need them, but as I was looking to do what I wanted I'd come across something that either sounded like it would, or sounded like something I wanted. I know there are 20 ways to accomplish things, how can I decide when I can't even find information that clearly explains what it will do. I've tried to find out what "related terms" are and have yet to find anything that explains what it does or how it works, what it effects or why or why not you would want it, and that is part of the core of Drupal.
I'm willing to put time in to the development of a beginner book, and again I feel the key part to that is enabling people to find what they need so the layout is very important.
Shari
Announcing
My book, Drupal Cookbook (for New Drupallers) is now in the Handbooks, under Installation and Configuration. Feel free to comment or add to it.
Wow, I can't believe I'm contributing after only 6 weeks with Drupal!
Nancy W.
now running 4 sites on Drupal so far
NancyDru
Congradulations!
Very nice Nancy! Glad to see it all posted.
I have created a Drupal group to discuss and talk about needed beginner documentation if anyone is interested you can find it here:
http://groups.drupal.org/beginner-documentation
Shari
...
I want to sincerely thank Nancy for her contributions. This will ease the path for folks that come after.
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
Very nice
Very nice Nancyw!
____________________________
Insurance Center
Evernote DB - full "corporate brochure" thread in useful form
I use a tool called Evernote to capture, categorise and search for all the various bits of information I find here (and elsewhere on the chaotic web). Very handy for a noob learner - see my full post at the bottom of the famous "corporate brochure mega-thread":
http://drupal.org/node/31896
If you want the database, email me at hans.drupal@gmail.com
could I ask a really stupid question?
Here is the simple basic basic question - because i have been playing around with drupal very infrequently [I need to get more into it].. but my question is this:
1- do we have to insall drupal on our server or do can we use drupal directly on drupal's site?
2- if we use it directly on drupal's site [as a node?], do we get a url that is a subdomain of drupal.org or do we get an independent one?
Anyone?
Thanks
nin
Your own server
You have to put it on your own server, but that server can be your local PC (see the book link below).
Nancy W.
Drupal Cookbook (for New Drupallers)
Adding Hidden Design or How To notes in your database
NancyDru