Need HELP! Working on library catalog for a small non-profit...
Hello!
This is my pathetic drupal newbie post. I have very little programming experience, and I am considering Drupal for a project. I work for a non-profit that supports people with vision loss- so I think Drupal could be great because it is accessible inherently (to screen readers etc)! I need to build a catalog of the books in this small library so that people can use it to look up what we have and perhaps put a book on hold etc. The foundation I am working with already has a great website- so I need to figure out where to start and if drupal will work best to create the catalog I need within the current site they have...
Basically- I don't know where to start and feel like all the stuff I have been reading has been still too technical for me. Would Drupal work for this? I feel like some of the modules I have been reading about would be great, so I hope so!
Thanks!
Check out the documentation
Check out the handbooks on this site here:
http://drupal.org/handbooks/
Also, the "USING DRUPAL" book published by O'Reilly is a great introduction to Drupal:
http://www.usingdrupal.com/
The new "Front End Drupal" book is also great for beginners.
For a library catalog I'd definitely use CCK, Taxonomy and Views - to get started ... so focus on learning those modules.
-backdrifting
See this other discussion
http://drupal.org/node/417276
And also check out these modules:
http://drupal.org/project/createfromweb
http://drupal.org/project/library
http://drupal.org/project/millennium (I made it) =)
http://drupal.org/project/hilcc (ditto)
http://drupal.org/project/bookpost
http://drupal.org/project/amazon
And for search, use the apachesolr module.
I built something similar...
I used the following modules to build a simple and powerful library:
CCK (To create a content type called "Library Item") http://drupal.org/project/cck
Views (Used to display content by Subject, Author, etc) http://drupal.org/project/views
Taxonomy (Core)(For subject and keyword searching. I also allowed free-tagging)
Library (with patron linked to user accounts) http://drupal.org/project/library
Create from web (To automatically populate content) http://drupal.org/project/createfromweb
Trigger (Core)(To email our office when something was checked out online)
Actions (Core)(To email our office when something was checked out online)
That's it and it works great!
Jason
www.amentcreative.com