By halloffame on

I have spent the last couple of hours reading around the forum. All I can say is wow! (and I mean in a bad way). You see I'm new to the whole CMS thing. I have spent the last 4 years making my sites using raw HTML and used PHP add-ons if I want to add some features. I have no knowledge in PHP whatsoever (as in zero!). Above average knowledge on HTML and CSS. Can handle graphics and web designs well, I could take pride in saying I'm good at this department but I don't know if this could help with my upcoming endeavors with Drupal.

I have yet to install Drupal on my site as I'm still looking on what version best suit my needs. I got this mixed feelings of nervousness and excitement. Wondering how hard is it to learn and customized (heavily) Drupal for someone like me. I'm a very willing apprentice and will put some effort in learning but I'd really wish it's just easy and it won't take me that long! How hard is it for someone like me to learn Drupal who has no knowledge on PHP and has no courage and wisdom facing database issues, security, patches, updates.... you know that sort of thing as what some are experiencing with Drupal? Tell me.

I would really appreciate some advice and words of wisdom before I'll start. The site that I'm working right now is a portal and community for a specific niche. I already have the design and the overall structure of the site. I just really don't know if I can implement it with Drupal.

About the site:
- Site has 3 sections and under each sections there would be 8-10 menus.
- Site will have its own search engine with google-like features.
- Will have a Directory Feature
- Forum (ok Drupal's build-in forum is not really much of my liking. I have also take a look at vbDrupal but their latest version only employs Drupal 4 I think. I want to disable the current forum feature of Drupal and integrate it with some other third party forum that i want.)
- A blog for those who want it. They could create their own blog on my site with their personalized theirname.mysite.com or mysite.com/theirname (or something of that extent).
- Daily news with 2 categories and a bunch of sub-categories.
- Users can give comments to the news and articles posted.
- user will be able to post stories, articles and news with images (but I still have to approve before publish)
- able to archive the news
- be able to serve banner and text ads (I'm looking at the Advertisement Module. But it isn't available for version 6. D6 was the version I wanted to install but after seeing this I think Im gonna go with D5. How hard is it to update?)
- Newsletter
- Polls
- should be 100% search engine friendly
- I'm able to insert iframe and full raw html page as I please.
- And some other stuff which I currently start to forget. ;)

Basically, this is what I want over all. Please give me some advice. Anything.. technical, some inspiration.. anything... Let me know what version best suits for me.

My head is currently spinning right now. Will I be able to do all of these with the current knowledge I have? Please advice advice advice. I would really appreciate it. Thank thanks thanks!

Comments

vm’s picture

vm commented

Considering the fact that dynamic websites are replacing static HTML as a quick pace, I'd say that you should get on board before you get left behind.

Drupal has a learing curve yes. However, customizing any CMS has its curve. Drupal is flexible which causes some confusion because there are more ways to accomplish a task then one will consider.

The more you learn, the better off you are. Just as you were with static HTML before CSS, then CSS implementation and the like.

Also note that while reading around the forums can gain you some insight, the documentation link at the top of Drupal.org leads you to some important information on developing, themeing module documentation and the like.

There are MANY tutorial sites for drupal that can be found using google.
There are videocasts, screenshots and audiocasts that help you learn.

drupal-dojo.com, lullabot.com are two that come to mind quickly. A little leg work on your part will get you a long way.

There are many non coder types who build sites in Drupal. What you get out of Drupal depends soley on what you are willing to invest in Drupal.

_____________________________________________________________________
My posts & comments are usually dripping with sarcasm.
If you ask nicely I'll give you a towel : )

reva’s picture

reva commented

people help me out wid read please s/w...i donno the logic or code for it...
i m planning to make a sms reader...for that i must 1st knw how to make read please s/w n then i can go further ...wat say?can some1 help me wid this?

AndriaD’s picture

AndriaD commented

I'm not sure if anyone can help you out "wid" anything, since I'm not sure what you're asking; maybe if you asked your question in standard english, someone could figure out what you need help with? (other than use of the language, that is).

Just a suggestion...

AndriaD’s picture

AndriaD commented

I was in exactly your position in February of this year, very competent at HTML/CSS, *slight* knowledge of php (or at least, using it for diff things), and started coming around here annoying all these nice people with my idjit questions, feeling like a total doofus. But these people really are very helpful and friendly -- I guess we've all been in this newbie position! -- and one can nearly always find some sort of answers to almost any questions you can think of to ask.

Yeah, there is a real learning curve with Drupal, but like he said, same goes for any other CMS, and of course, the more powerful a program is, the harder it can be to master it -- and Drupal is WAYYYYYYYYYY powerful! In the past I've also looked at phpNuke, and recently, Joomla; Nuke has too many hacks/leaks/security bugs and the forums are neither as helpful nor as friendly, and Joomla, well, it LOOKS great, tons of great templates for it, but most of the modules don't seem to really work at all -- so it makes a beautiful blog and not really much else.

With Drupal, there are so many modules it may takes DAYS just to go thru the list, and hey, most of them work exactly as described, and you can even get (varying amounts of) support either from the module author or here in the Drupal forum.

For inserting your own iframes/HTML... it can be done, though sometimes it takes a little finesse to get it to look right. The CSS files are so all-encompassing that you often get unexpected results from very mundane things, like table code -- I had to basically take apart a DirectNic square banner, based on a simple table, and remake it using DIVs, to get it to look right in the sidebar -- but sometimes that's because of the theme you're using. Tables also give problems if you use teasers -- because of course, un-closed table tags will mess up things royally for everything below them -- so a teaser that starts off with table tags will screw up the rest of the page. It appears that HTML is moving quickly away from tables to CSS-styled Div code, and it's a bit of an adjustment (at least for me; I figured HTML tables were THE way to put together a page, but I'm learning that it ain't necessarily so).

For serving ads, as you said, the Advertisement module hasn't yet caught up, but if you just want to randomly rotate, that's fairly easy with php code, and Drupal is amazingly friendly to inserted php bits (for us non-programmers, php is SOOOOO much easier than Perl it's not even funny! -- you can actually look at the code and just about figure out what's going on with it!).

For the rest of the stuff you said, yep, yep, it's all good. When you first start looking at Drupal and how it works, you feel like you're trying to read a foreign language -- but it's actually fairly straightforward, and doesn't take too long to start sinking in -- and there are lot of helping hands. :-)

Andria