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By typografuk on
Hi,
I've downloaded and have just begun the drupal tutorial but want to make sure I'm not wasting my time.
I have a simple html website already programmed but the owner (an investment banker) wants to be able to upload new press releases (PDFs) to his site in a fairly simple and numbskull proof way without having to call up a web programmer and without having to learn html.
Was thinking drupal might be a good way to achieve this but I'm very unfamiliar. I need a site that will have a simple interface for the owner to upload pdfs, then have them appear on his presss page with a short description (that he types in) and link to download the pdf.
Thanks much! :) - (:
Comments
Use the right tool for the right job.
Honestly Drupal might be a bit much for that project. I personally use WordPress and Drupal depending on the project. Drupal is kind of like an atom bomb when you might only need a hand grenade. I recommend you experiment with both as it shouldn't be hard to achieve your goals in either. WordPress is definitely easier on the non web dev users (start flame war now) but you can spend a lot of time fighting its blog like behaviors so sometimes it's a wash.
They key is to try different tools, make the right call or spend time yelling at your machine and choking your monitor.
Good luck.
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One other option you might want to look at, that isn't quite so bloggy as wordpress yet easier to use 'out-of-the-box' than drupal, is joomla. And there's like a bazillion snazzy templates you can choose from.
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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." - Ben Franklin
"Search is your best friend." - Worldfallz
thanks, a bit familiar with
thanks, a bit familiar with wordpress will try that.
But funny I get a joomla recommendation on a drupal forum. Is that considered an easier CMS to learn?
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It's all about the best tool for the job-- i have no problem recommending another CMS if drupal isn't a good fit. ;-)
imo joomla is easier to use out-of-the-box for non-geeks-- as long as you don't want to change anything-- and i mean anything. 'out-of-the-box' means exactly that-- just the way it comes. That's a very important caveat-- because the second you need to change anything in joomla, no matter how seemingly minor, you'll end up wanting to stick sharp objects in your eyes instead.
Drupal is an awesome cms/framework-- extremely powerful and flexible. But all that power and flexibility come at the price of a bit of a learning curve. For me, there's no question it's worth it. But that means getting your hands dirty with php and html and css. Customizations in drupal that take maybe 6-12 lines of code and 10 minutes to figure out would make me want to throw my laptop out the window if i had to do it in joomla-- and even then I probably wouldn't be able to figure it out.
But if you don't want to code and can be satisfied by installing it, using a snazzy premade template, and adding some content-- joomla is going to be easier.
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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." - Ben Franklin
"Search is your best friend." - Worldfallz
just read...
I just read a thread at The Admin Zone about a users' frustrations with Joomla.
While Joomla's backend looks pretty, it's actually quite complicated.
~silverwing - this comment is worth a penny....
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MisguidedThoughts | showcaseCMS
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very interesting thread. i may just have to install a current release of joomla and check it out-- if i can get past the epileptic seizure seeing it again is likely to cause me ;-)
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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." - Ben Franklin
"Search is your best friend." - Worldfallz
Second that
I've been using Drupal for a few months and it took me a while not to feel totally lost. To begin to harness it's power I had to teach myself PHP, CSS and Drupal Hook usage basics. I'm developing my own site so I have the luxury of dealing with the learning curve without the pressures of a deadline.
But I will say that in the long term, if you need to create websites with complex features such as e-commerce, social networks, dynamic content (plus many more) dealing with Drupal's learning curve is totally worth it.