Today I installed Drupal on my home computer.

Now what to do next?

The problem I have is that without an overview of the whole Drupal system and what Drupal is capable of, I am not able to plan and proceed to build the site I have in mind. I need a little bit knowledge of all the major aspects of Drupal at the beginning.

Many people are stuck in this situation, I would guess. I have been doing web stuff for quite some time (anybody still remember Selena Sol's shopping cart scripts in 1997? ); but almost zero knowledge about popular CMSs; and reading manual (at least at the beginning) is no fun any more, instead I try to get away with examples and tutorials. After all, ease of use is a major point to employ CMSs, isn't it?

Now back to what to do next. What I am wishing for is a step by step instruction to build a sample web site, using Drupal. This will be a tremendous help to someone new to Drupal and CMS. The sample site could be anything, be it a company's web site, or a portal for a city, a dating site, anything. It doesn't have to touch to many features, the graphics can be bare bone. Instead, it uses some of the key features, and walks me from the beginning to finish.

The idea is similar to the Ruby on Rails video: people who already know programming just want a quick and dirty crash course to get started. After the "course", they know which section of the handbook to read, and what to plan for. If Drupal has such a "pet store" type tutorial(not necessarily a video, of course), it will be very attractive to huge crowd of first time CMS users. I think as such a great product it deserves the attention and widespread adoption.

Thanks for reading.

Comments

venkat-rk’s picture

I think the tutorials on www.funnymonkey.com and, more recently, www.cookingwithdrupal.org will help you to some extent. There seems to be quite a bit of effort going on in the direction you have suggested, just that it is happening slowly.

sallycms’s picture

Well, I have been reading about drupal for the past year and did an extensive comparison between current cms online.. but I can not even begin to create a site with drupal from scratch.....
can some one help me to convert my site www.sallyahmed.com to drupal....... am a php developer and have worked with templates but customizing drupal is sorry to say been a headache ... need simple abc steps to start...... at least a complete simple site with details steps.

thanks,
Sally
R.S.V.P

dealmaker’s picture

I think the concept of having drupal sample sites that allows users to login as administrator with all modules installed and configurated is not that unreal. Just start a site all the modules installed and ask people to use them to do all kinds of configurations with the modules.

Heine’s picture

You may find something useful at http://drupal.org/handbook/site-recipes . If not, I'm afraid you will have to do with the handbook.

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