Anyone else feel overwhelmed???
boristhemoggy - March 4, 2009 - 19:17
I've been playing with this for a couple of hours now. It installed very easily and looks great. But dam it's overwhelming with all the things you can do!
I still have no idea what vocabulary is and taxonomy is stuffing animals isn't it?
Stories and pages and content and nodes? What the heck are nodes?
...please someone tell me that I'm not the only one feeling lost and thinking this is going to be a major investment in time to set this site up!
no i'm in the same boat, it
no i'm in the same boat, it seems everything you want to do, there is a way to do it, you just need to learn and understand how.
i just keep drupal as a side project at the moment, learn as much as i can, and ask a lot of questions to further my understanding, the community around here is great and most of the time somebody will offer some sort of help and advice.
keep plugging away mate as im sure i will do
i agree
i've been playing with drupal for a month or so now. checking out video tutorials helped me. once you find your way, it gets easier. hang in there.
Have you read
Have you read http://drupal.org/getting-started/before?
cookbook is helpful, too.
http://drupal.org/handbook/customization/tutorials/beginners-cookbook
It is IKEA!
I need for the features of Drupal, but I have to build the basis of the site myself. Some features as clean URL would be nice out of the box.
It is out of the box
Drupal does support clean URLs out of the box. If you haven't got them it's not because of Drupal, but because of your hosting provider.
Let me echo . . .
Let me echo what one of the other posters wrote - hang in there. I haven't been using Drupal for very long either (to be precise, about 11 days - but I've put a lot of time in every day)
but it sure makes a lot more sense now than when I started. So jump in, get your feet wet - and you'll figure it out.
Regards,
-B
one thing at a time
take one thing at a time and eventually you'll get there. sometimes it can be frustrating if you want to do one simple thing and you have to learn a big area of functionality to accomplish it -- but if you hang in there you'll understand the reasons why things seem more complex then they need to be.
It's easy to feel overwhelmed
But hang in there, it's so worth it! I'm a little past the basics now and have about 6 Drupal sites under my belt, but still learning how to implement features. I don't even think I have scratched the surface yet! I just wish I had more time. There's so much to learn and do with Drupal and so many possibilities. The way I found to start learning was to actually have a project in mind, even a just a demo one for your own practice and then start building it out.
There are some excellent site recipes here to play with. If you learn better from books I recommend three books for getting started. I'm sure there are some other excellent ones out there but I recommend these two because I've worked through them:
Using Drupal by Angela Byron, Addison Berry, Nathan Haug, and Jeff Eaton
Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions by Mark Noble
Hang in there and if you hit a roadblock, visit this website, search the documentation, ask questions.
--
The Coding Pad
Drupal is so remarkably
Drupal is so remarkably flexible that you can't take it all in overnight. It's one of those things that you work with for awhile until something clicks in your brain and you go "Ah hah! NOW I get it!"
One thing that helped me was to design a specific kind of site. Concentrate on that and list the features that you want, then peruse the contributed modules looking for the ones that will help build the site. You'll learn a lot of the basics that way and you'll also pick up some knowledge of specific modules that way.
If you’re serious about using
If you’re serious about using Drupal you should consider purchasing one of the recent books which explain in great detail how to set up the many features Drupal provides. Using Drupal published by O’Reilly Media and Leveraging Drupal published by Wrox contain lot’s of useful information about building Drupal websites. There are many comments about these books in the Forums here.
I think that Drupal
I think that Drupal documentation isn't very good... E.g. theming, I read the documentation and I had no idea how to build a simple theme, I had to watch 3rd party screencast to get idea how to get it started. So good book may be very helpful.
I think the Drupal
I think the Drupal documentation is pretty awesome given that it's contributed by volunteers and driven by the force of community, but you do need to augment it with other sources because we all have different learning styles and different needs. And you are always welcome to edit the handbook, clarify things, make things easier to understand, even create your own pages! So once you learn how to do something, jump in there and see how you can improve the documentation!!
--
The Coding Pad
I agree with you the
I agree with you the documentation is lacking. There are many things that are great in the documentation and there is a lot of it but it still needs A LOT of improvement. Specifically, understanding theming was difficult and it took me a long time to start to get it. And like you I had to rely on 3rd party sites and screencasts to just begin to understand it.
I've asked many questions on the forums that just never get answered or take months before you get an answer. Learning Drupal has been frustrating but I still believe its a great system (in fact the frustration is sometimes so great I'm still contemplating switching to Django because I love python even though Django doesn't have many of the pre-built features of drupal. I'll probably create one site in Django to see how it feels).
Drupal is a powerful tool and as I learn to use it, I can do cool stuff faster. I've been using Drupal casually for over a year and I feel like I've just scratched the surface.
This is what helps...
As a former assembler and C++ programmer, I was loathe to learn new languages through-and-through, including the finer points of HTML, XTML, XML, PHP, etc. I was, and am, amazed at what you can do with Drupal without writing a single line of any code, whatsoever.
Pleasantly, I discovered that PHP is very similar to C++, so I am able to do some simple programming and even made my own subroutine module within just a few weeks of using Drupal. You can see what a few weeks of work (1 week of which just reading, experimenting, watching videos and experimenting) can do by going to http://www.flashback.tv and seeing initial results.
So, hang in there. It's easier than you think.
-Videoman
www.flashback.tv
=-=
a node= a centering point of components. Thus a piece of content (centering point) where fields (components) come together.
Pages and stories are content types. Pages are a content type that you would use to create something in the vain of a static web page.
Stories are a content type that allow for some built in features like paganation and menu hierarchy which allows you to create parent and child pages in the story. ie: see the documentation area of drupal.org.
there is documentation that can be found using drupal.org search and google search that explains the terminology used in drupal. A dictionary helps a great deal as well.
Lots of resources
This site's user-created documentation starts right off with a lot of the answers you're looking for. For example, on basic concepts and terminology, try these:
http://drupal.org/node/19828
http://drupal.org/getting-started/before/terminology
One of the best things a Drupal newcomer can do is scan the structure of documentation on this site. Not read it all; it's far too much. Just get a sense of what topics are covered and where.
There's an even greater wealth of guides, tutorials etc. on other sites. FWIW, here's my own take on explaining some technical terms to newbies
http://www.drupalace.com/EDAM/terminology
and some links of interest.
http://www.drupalace.com/links
Good luck!
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Manuals, Q&A and more for the Drupal beginner
Thanks
That's a very useful website you have there, looks like you might be at Ace level already :)
thanks for sharing.
--
The Coding Pad
I've been using drupal for a
I've been using drupal for a little over a year and still learning by the bucket load. I have done some pretty damn cool stuff but wow how I still feel I am just scratching the surface.
My advice is to always challenge yourself to try new things. If you created something that later you think there is a better way then change it, you'll find by doing so you will uncover unother room of buckets filled with knowledge.
Taxonomy isn't taxidermy...
Taxonomy is a very nice feature that'll help you categorize your content and easily build, say, an archive.
Say you have several types of content about trees. Then you create a vocabulary named Trees, which will have several terms: Pine, Spruce, Fir, Douglas Fir, Redwood, Cedar, etc.
Things don't end here... but, really, read, read like mad. Drupal is a very powerful tool, so powerful that, yes, overwhelms most of us. I've here for a while and most days a still learn how to do things. Which is great! :-)
BTW. Taxidermy is about stuffing animals. :-)
Warm regards from sunny México!
:-)
Pepe
Warm regards from sunny México!
Pepe
:-)