By Drandarian Grey on
These are my own thoughts as to how it is going with Drupal.
Sitting here staring at the admin of drupal now for two weeks and it is getting me know where. I found that I am not geek-efied enough to do much more than install it and then add stories. Adding a tab so that I can post news to something other than the main page. I have over and over read the documentation section looking for even the slightest hint on how to do some of the simplest things.
Now I am pretty sure I am completely missing the object of things here. Now baring using the documentation section here "which I appologise but it really needs updating and alot better organization" Would there be another place that offers some more New person friendly tutorial, help?
DG
Comments
First, one of the easiest
First, one of the easiest ways to add posts to tabs would be to use http://drupal.org/project/views to create some blocks, then use http://drupal.org/project/quicktabs to place the block(s) into tabs.
Second, there is an effort going on to redesign d.o. and reorganize the the docs. In the meantime, maybe one of the drupal books (just search amazon) might be of more use.
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"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." -- Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Search is your best friend." -- Worldfallz
The problem is the
The problem is the terminology that is used here, place tabs in block etc, And I do have views and it is not one of the easiest things in the world to use when you are just learning... The problem I am coming across is the way things are explained it is if one needs to be already experienced in some language.
Creating as I posted in another article here, say 6 tabs across the top of the page, each tab represents 1 category of news,
a great example of this is at http://arstechnica.com
Main Business Apple and so on. Is this possible.. and if so would there be anywhere that could explain it a little more simply..
DG..
Firstly, don't fret. You are
Firstly, don't fret. You are not alone. You are not abnormal.
Two weeks is nothing. I've been spending between 2-6 hours a day for three months planning a large school website, and I'm not even at the stage of adding the static content or having all the 'pieces' (sections and features of the site) fit together yet.
The main problem is (I found out by a similar experience to yours) is that reading alone does not teach you anything. In the first few weeks after installing Drupal I read thousands of pages and watched dozens of screencasts, and although I thought I was learning, really it was very inefficient - I couldn't get my head around what I *now* know to be the simplest of concepts because I was reading without doing or without context. For example, I read hundreds of pages about taxonomy and ended up more confused than when I started, but I learnt far more in one hour just simply playing with it.
My advice is set-up a test site - a completely separate installation of drupal. And test the things you read about until you trash the site. Then delete it, and reinstall. When you are certain that you know enough about something to set it up the way you want, apply it to your live site.
Also playing on a test site will generate specific questions with specific modules rather than general 'I don't understand' or 'how would you do this' questions. Specific problems get solved on the forums, general ones get general answers. Read the documentation of course, and then get clarification about specific issues on the forums. I notice you only have a handful of posts in two weeks. That's perhaps indicative that you're not using the forums as a learing tool as much as you could/should be.
I look at the 'recent posts' and read about other people's problems that might affect me, and subsricbe to a lot of these threads. After some time, I found that I was actually able to help people because I'd read about the same problem previously, or had encoutered whilst playing on my test site.
Thanks Anti, I do have a
Thanks Anti,
I do have a couple of test sites actually, more and more I am picking up different titbits on development and so on. I know two weeks is not much, But to just sit there and get not one things accomplished is a bit bizarre to me. If I did this in my work I would not eat or pay the rent.. :)
If I could understand the simplest beginnings of the taxonomy then I could move ahead. But it is more and more lookign like it is written by "geeks for geeks" if you pardon the expression. Same goes with the books, it is one expert explaining it to other experts, which when it all boils down to it does not help anyone that well just needs to start out and learn the basics....
I always say to my friends "I am coder-impared".
So wanting different categories for say Tanning leather, Leather tools and so on seems to be very convoluted? there is no way that I can fathom to just go in create said categories and then start posting stories/news to that specific section.
DG
So wanting different
It's actually quite easy, and one of drupal's strengths. Just go to admin/content/taxonomy. Click the "Add vocabulary" tab, give it a name (say "Leather Tanning"), select which page types you want to use that category (vocabulary) on (say the "story" type), and click "submit". There's quite a few other options for how to use that category, but keep it simple to start. Then back on the admin/content/taxonomy page, your new vocabulary of "Leather Tanning" will now be there and you can click "Add terms" to add some terms to it. You can add terms like "Tools", "Supplies", "Techniques", whatever. And you can always go back and add more as you think of them.
Then, from your navigation menu, click "Create Content" and then "Story", tada-- you'll have a select box to apply any one of those terms to that particular story.
===
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." -- Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Search is your best friend." -- Worldfallz
I pretty much agree with
I pretty much agree with everything anti said-- but most importantly, "don't fret". Drupal is most assuredly NOT the easiest of the CMSs out there to grok. It can be difficult even with a technical background (which I had, and still had difficulties), I can't even imagine how difficult it must be without one. It's not you-- there is a fairly steep learning curve.
However, after having spent quite a bit of time evaluating several different CMSs, I can say without a doubt the investment you make in learning drupal will repay itself a thousand times. There is no more flexible CMS/framework out there. It's never a question of if drupal can something but how is the best way to do it with drupal. Once you get the "drupal way" (and it will seem very much like a light bulb going off "ah ha" type thing), you'll wonder what was so difficult.
A couple of good links I always recommend to beginners:
Now, as for your specific request. Those "tabs" are generally known as "primary links" in drupal. A very quick way to get some would be to download the http://drupal.org/project/zen theme, set your default theme to zen classic (at admin/build/themes). Then, go to admin/build/menu and add some items to the "Primary Links" menu. You can put any links there you like-- external pages, internal pages. Anything with a URL. tada-- you have "tabs".
Regarding taxonomy, don't get hung up on the $10 word "taxonomy". It's nothing more than a fancy way of saying categories. You use taxonomy to organize and categorize the content of your site.
In your arstechnica example, there might be a taxonomy vocabulary (vocabularies are just groups of terms) for "News Type" and each term in the vocabulary would be represented by the terms on one tab. drupal has some rudimentary handling of taxonomy built-in (you don't have to do anything to use it). So, for example, if the first term in your "News Type" vocabulary is "World News" it might have an id of "1" (just the number of the term, each term also has a unique number), drupal will automatically provide a page at http://www.example.com/taxonomy/1 that will be a short summary listing of all articles tagged with the term "World News".
But anti is right-- there's no substitution for just doing things. If you're not sure what something does, just try it out. And post questions as you encounter them. But try to be specific, questions like "how do i setup a social networking site like facebook" are not likely to get an answer whereas a question like "ok, i turned on the blog module, and made my first blog post, how do I list it as a tab" probably will.
===
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." -- Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Search is your best friend." -- Worldfallz
> It's never a question of
> It's never a question of if drupal can something but how is the best way to do it with drupal
Nail on the head.
The reason I've spent so long 'planning' my site, is that there are so many ways in which to create and display content, each with their own pros and cons, flexibility and limitations. You've got to be fairly careful that you're choosing the best overall way to do something, because it may be difficult or impossible to change later when you have your first thousand nodes.
However, I need to remind myself daily that I can't keep experimenting and testing every method or solution for days or weeks. It is very easy to get hung-up on this, not make *any* decision, and so not proceed further.
From this perspective, I really don't think it is Drupal itself that is the problem; it isn't too difficult, or technical, or confusing. It's simply the flexibility and choice which is more overwhelming than anything else.
Now, as for your specific
I did try zen Wordfallz, but I kept having the strangest problem. Everytime I enabled the theme and went back to the main page none of the links to admin, contact and so on worked. there were there and colour coded as links but nothing worked. I would then proceed to go back to say garland and it worked. I have tried reinstalling drupal and tried it again locally and on a remote server, *thinking localhost may have a problem* but no still the same error. Why it does this still have not worked out at all..
DG
Try going to
Try going to admin/build/menu/settings and setting both the primary and secondary links to the "Navigation" menu.
===
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." -- Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Search is your best friend." -- Worldfallz
Placing content onto specific pages
DG, I second all the good advice people have given here.
As for specific advice, I'm not sure whether the main struggle you're having is the common beginner question of "How to I place a certain piece of content onto a given page (other than the front page)?". If that is the question you're facing, let me offer the following resources:
http://www.drupalace.com/blog_entry_understanding_node_list_pages_drupal...
http://www.drupalace.com/EDAM/placing_content
http://drupal.org/node/176252
Hope that helps you, or someone -
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Easy Drupal Admin Manual, Drupal questions, other stuff for the newbie: http://www.drupalace.com
i'm weird
I don't know I'm weird. Though I haven't dived into Drupal on a deep level, for starters, it seems easier to me than wordpress.
my hosting provider has fantastico, so that was a god-send as far as not worrying about installation. I found this guy on you tube and he has some great video tutorials:
www.drupaldude.com
We'll see, I might be changing my tune in a few weeks, but so far so good.
... every time i see some
... every time i see some one mention a fantastico install, i get the chills. it's ok to learn and play and create and blow away drupal installs really quickly, but just know for a production or dev site fantastico isn't very fantastic. It takes all of 5 minutes to install drupal manually, do yourself a favor, and install it manually when you're ready to start building real sites. The time you save with fantastico will be more than blown away the first time you encounter one of the numerous bazaar behaviors that seem all too common with fantistico installs.
===
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." -- Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Search is your best friend." -- Worldfallz
Yep, I've helped about five
Yep, I've helped about five people in the last two months trying to troubleshoot really weird upgrade issues. Then about the tenth post they mention fantisico. All you can do is say 'sorry, can't help you further'. Basically, it is an abnormal install, and you should expect some abnormal things happen to it that only other fantastico user can troubleshoot.
Getting there.
Well thank you everyone for all the advise. Basically what I have done so far is scrapped the install I had. And no I am not using some odd installer :) Any I install is from scratch so at least I learn from the ground up.
It may sound a bit odd but I have taken all the terminology that is used in Drupal and turned it into something that makes sense to me, for example: Taxonomy is a fancy word for categories or categorisation (Thanks to WordFallz), and so on. Now I have created dozens of categories and the terms for them so I get used to what that does. And then I will move on to doing other things.
Well as I am not one for giving up, just getting frustrated, then I keep working at it until I break it or it works.
Wording is everything, if you don't understand the words (Terminology) it can make a world of difference. A good example of good and bad wording,
I found was this:
Under modules
Color 6.4 Allows the user to change the colour scheme of certain themes.
Now it may be me but, at first I did not enable this, I first thought it meant that users could change colours of certain themes.
when it actually is just the admin that can change the colours not a specific user.
I seem to be getting there slowly now. But I shall return with more questions :)
DG