Hi all
We have installed MAMP and Drupal 6 and spent hours trying to do something with the Drupal blue theme, something like add content, anything that would get us moving - nothing happens!
This seems a very poor way forward, we have searched and searched and read a heap of help but nowhere does it say exactly, do this, then that etc to get beginners up and running.
The forums are full of 'couldn't get this or that going...' etc
Is there somewhere that actually gets people on the first step that alters the site because at least with that we think we could move ahead. The structure of what we want is very simple and we have used it and others like it in business - that is airlines, charities and others.
We even organised a national administration involving 970 offices and more than 20,000 staff while the computer people complained daily, weekly, monthly and eventually yearly, that the phone lines were down, the software had to be rewritten, their SQuirreLs weren't working or the Apaches were on strike!
If we can get on top of this we will write a short manual to make it simple for new arrivals coming behind us.
Any pointers please to simple guide - we have looked at all the Drupal stuff but it is not helpful.
Comments
Read up on Drupal - plenty of docs and books out there ...
I'd recommend reading this book:
http://www.usingdrupal.com/
It's one of the best intros to the Drupal CMS.
Also make sure to read the "Getting Started" material here:
http://drupal.org/handbooks
Additionally when you mention that "... nothing happens!" what do you exactly mean?
-backdrifting
Thanks
backdrifting and duggoff for the replies - much appreciated.
As you both mention, when we click on say, Content Management or any of those menus or sub-menus on left sidebar, a 'page' appears that does not allow any editing or adding of content. - Nowhere will it allow us to create pages, content, stories etc.
It take it this must mean a file is corrupt or missing and we must re-install.
Thanks to both.
Not exactly clear on your
Not exactly clear on your problem but i'm assuming that you are logged in with the administrator account first of all. If anyone else's account is being used, you have to go to the admin -> user -> permissions to grant permissions to a role to do things (or define a new role), then you have to go to your users and assign them to that role.
Once you're logged in you should see a menu with the name of the currently logged in user. The first link should be Create Content which opens up the options of building pages and such.
Additionally this forum's whole purpose is to help people who are having problems. I wouldn't expect anything less than what you see now. How do you do this, that or the other. Any 'guide' written is quickly scrolled off by the questions of hundreds of users using hundreds of modules in thousands of configurations.
You may need to be a bit more specific, but I'll try...
When you install Drupal, you are given the opportunity to create an admin user. Once that is done, at the very least you should be able to log in to the site, and from the navigation menu in the left column (using the Garland default theme) select Create content, and create a page or a story. While creating the content item, you will be able to choose where in the existing menu structure you want to appear, and whether or not you want to have it show up on the front page. Can you do those things? If not, something is broken.
Doug Gough
ImageX Media
Resources
You say you looked at all the Drupal stuff; are you including http://drupal.org/getting-started?
There's a Drupal 5 how to at http://www.mediafire.com/?fvt2jxsdxvs
Unfortunately, you don't really explain where your trouble resides. You state that you're trying to "do something with the Drupal blue theme." That's remarkably generic.
Are you trying to modify the theme? Are you trying to add a new page? Are you able to log in? What screens are you getting, and how is it not working?
Perhaps with a little more information, we can help you out...
David
That particular Absolute hell
was due to a corrupt download - donwloaded again and re-installed - Working!
Thanks to all for the pointers and sorry to be vague.
We spent eleven hours yesterday to discover how to put permanent primary links along the top of all pages and relevant secondary links down one side of relevant pages - simple as you can get in Dreamweaver.
So after a total of twenty two hours between the two of us in one day - we still have not discovered how Drupal does the simplest of tasks common to hundreds of thousands of websites.
I found 'Books page' a minor victory! just before going to bed. Today I will see if I can truly understand how it works.
Bye for now and thanks.
Sounds painful
Sounds like you are having lots of trouble.
Maybe you need to enlist the help of a web developer. If you're not able to read the handbooks and tutorials or watch the videos, it sounds like half a day with someone who's built a website before may help you get up to speed with a few concepts.
Seeing as you're not able to find your answers in the existing documentation or forums, you could consider approaching a local one of those people who have successfully built those hundreds of thousands of websites in Drupal before now. Many of them are pretty helpful volunteers. The rest are probably available at market rates.
I've seen heaps of IT-beginners come up with pretty reasonable results pretty quickly, so there's hope out there.
.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards
Thanks
Yes, it's a bit odd and as you say many have been succesful, many thousands of valiant souls like us are leaving questions or statements such as mine on the forums.
The videos, I have just watched one titled 'Add ImageCache and Imagefield to Drupal Site', which starts off saying 'we'll just upload the Image Cache and Image field folders to the Site.
Immediate problem is, we don't have those folders in our Modules folder, so we watched the whole video, nice chap, clearly spoken, bit fast, but we'll rewind. We're going to make the folders ourselves and that should work BUT does the fact they're not there mean the download was corrupt - yet again - or is it OK to make our own (we are anyway, we like the punishment! It's character building and we learn by having to start again).
Next video suggestion: "if the folders aren't there - make them yourself." May be.
The point is that until we have been through the whole process we won't know if making our own was OK, nor do we know if the original dowload was bad and this is episodical in filling the forums with the similar queries on other minor matters this raises.
This is where the time goes! 18 mins for the very instructive video + 18 mins to do the job (assuming it goes right and works at the end!) - oddly Wordpress have a button for this sort of thing, which appears the way to go and we hope to find the module that enables this.
We're hoping that we don't have to do that for every page/story of our initial two hundred page/story website but we'll read on :-) !!
Well, from the way you
Well, from the way you describe it, it sounds like you got some new folders, were told where to put the new folders, and were confused because the new folders were not there already?
It probably would help if there was README.txt file in that directory you were stating at when trying to decide whether to make a subfolder of your own.
Individual module videos seldom (and shouldn't) go into detail on steps that are totally common to all sites and installs. It's normal that a video would skip over that bit, it would be tedious for every other developer to have it repeated every single time.
There may be lots of docs out there, but it seems that as well as being in the install instructions of pretty much every contrib module, the process for installing a module is written up in many (too many) different places in the handbook.
Adding Modules and Themes
Installing contributed modules
Installing Modules and Themes
Installing Modules
If you think that the documentation needs improving, let us know which instructions you were following that were unclear. If you were not following instructions, good luck. :-(
We can be pretty clear that the download was not 'corrupt'. Things just would not work at all, and certainly not to the extent of having everything except one core button show up. You just missed seeing the button at the top of the list called Create Content. That's OK. Many people do for some reason. But that's all there is to it. Just a D'oh moment, not a messed up install.
.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards
...
Even a complete bungling fool with a rudimentary understanding of English understands "Create Content" and what it might mean.
You're either a troll or incapable if being helped because you are incapable of following basic instructions, and I kindly ask you not to pollute our forum with your rambling treatise on what is wrong with Drupal, and instead look in the mirror.
Pimp your Drupal 8 Toolbar - make it badass.
Adaptivetheme - theming system for people who don't code.
I can definitely commiserate
I can definitely commiserate with Blah de Blah and wonder if complete azzes like "jmburnz" are the norm here?
Earlier this week I undertook the task of creating a new site from scratch on a pristine Ubuntu server. TODAY I was finally able to get things working to the point that I feel I can just now begin thinking about my content, what theme to use, etc.
That is 2 full days of pouring over the drupal beginners guides, looking at the videos (just trying to figure out which one was "volume 1 of the series" seems to be an effort of futility). And I'm not some run of the mill "end user" - I am an IT professional of over 20 years who has built more websites than I can count using nothing but vi.... If I'm having trouble, I feel truly amazed that a pour soul like Blah de Blah would even attempt this.
...
I have been here for 3 years and seen posts like this on an almost monthly basis, its common, they start off with non-specific issues and then write rambling going nowhere replies that invariably slag off Drupal or the documentation in some way or another when ANYONE tries to offer an olive leaf. Hang around a bit, you'll see...
You have been here what, 3 days? You spent *2 whole days* learning a complex piece of software and you think you have earned the right to start moaning already?
Give me a break ok - I've spent 3 years helping thousands of users with their Drupal sites and spent countless, countless hours contributing to this project.
Often IT old hands have problems because Drupal is conceptually different and it takes time to discard the old ways for the new. I don't know what you did in those 20 years but any old OS hand knows full well that Drupal docs beat the crap out of 95% of all FOSS projects.
What utterly ironic about your post is everyday hundreds of users with little or no knowledge at all get their sites up and running with few issues and just a bit of elbow grease.
Pimp your Drupal 8 Toolbar - make it badass.
Adaptivetheme - theming system for people who don't code.
With all due respect.
With all due respect, Jmburnz, the OP did not sound terribly unreasonable.
He had battled for some time against what he explains is a faulty download and I guess some measure of frustration would be understandable. For which, it seemed to me, he took some care to apologise.
...
Fair enough dave, take my comments as a bad hair day, it was that the language and style of writing reminded me something terrible of a particularly nasty and highly sophisticated troll we had here a while ago, who was eventually blocked... felt like a case of deja vu and I'm still not convinced I am wrong.
Pimp your Drupal 8 Toolbar - make it badass.
Adaptivetheme - theming system for people who don't code.
Yeah, boy Jim, your comment
Yeah, boy Jim, your comment sure did set me back in my chair a few inches. Uncalled for and insensitive. I have never said that to anyone here but boy, Jim, you shocked me. Makes me think of those many times I have encountered posters out on the net who say that using Drupal is made even more difficult by nasty remarks from people "helping" in the forum. I have not experienced that; people have been very nice to me so, wow, when I read your tidbits...
When a newbie comes to Drupal, particularly from a css/html background, what's shockingly easy and clear to you is overwhelmingly difficult for us/them. I know from experience, too, that every step is painful. Doing one simple thing can take me two days of study -- sometimes way more! -- before I figure out the way to do it, from the many ways there are to do "things." Even now, without a developer background, I can read instructions over and over in the documentation and not have one clue as to what is being communicated. Arguments? What's an argument? Context? An array? Huh? A preprocess what? In programming language, what's that mean? For some time, I was going round and round figuring out what the difference was between template and tpl..the latter was template also. And I know from my days and months of reading here, that many know that the documentation for Drupal is an issue. So accept that until we all help the documentation reach a point where it's written with a fog index of about 7 or 8, which is the target for even Wall Street Journal, and where the techniques used in communicating difficult science topics to a lay audience are adopted --- as well as "tracks" perhaps for levels of drupalers -- this is the sort of questioning that will continue to be posted. It's a culture shock for many of us, people who truly, truly want to learn and adopt this cms.
My suggestion to the poster? Don't watch the podcasts at mustardmedia.com, drupal dojo, lynda.com, lullabot, youtube or elsewhere -- not yet. I am sure that the best thing I ever did was to ** first ** read "Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6" by David Mercer. It will take you step-by-step from install through the very first steps as well as introduce you to a few of the most commonly used modules that need to be added to your Drupal install to add more functionality. I encourage you to step back and read it. Do what he says. That's important.
Then go to the Drupal start-up documentation. That documentation will make much more sense after reading Mercer's book. And, no, I'm not Mercer's publicist. I just know the struggle. The podcasts focus, more often than naught, on how-to or module in Drupal. Without a foundation of knowledge, you can quickly become lost. So do the book, check out the documentation, play with your install, then check out the "general" podcasts. Build a foundation of how-to's and knowledge first -- with the primer stuff.
I've also got a google notebook running on my computer here. It's for my Drupal edu. With the use of tags and sections, I am keeping all of my notes in that one spot because I've found that I can run across a solution in a forum for "something" that vaguely sounds like I'll need it and saving it for future use has become a helpful and time-saving practice.
Is it a struggle worth it? I still think "yes" although I do have Dreamweaver and hand-coding dreams. In the end, the up-front pain will be worth it but there's no doubt that you'll need to get used to the fact that you'll have to budget time for learning.
Bad hair day, indeed. I felt better about those statements until I read the last clause. I've always been of the mind to be kind to people until they give you good reason to put your toe in the sand and draw a line.
This poster didn't deserve to see your toe....
I'm hoping he knows that there are many, many, many volunteers here who are super people who, I can attest, have helped me beyond my expectations. If he doesn't know that, he'll soon discover it.
Support
Hi all,
Thanks very much for the support, encouragement and useful information and jim, hope you had your hair done!
I will follow suggestions as now the field of available help has been narrowed down to the fairly small shed in the field and I don't have to wander around the farm picking up bits that look like they might be useful.
We would like to learn it through our own understanding and hopefully write it down A,B,C for future Noobies.
We have created Content, Menus, Blocks and that took two hours to understand but when the links we have created in the Header are clicked we end up with a Create Content page every time instead of the Page or Story we have created and linked to that 'Parent'.
Even creating the Content there and linking it still doesn't produce that page when the links in the Header are clicked.
Our remit is simple, we want links in the header say, Continents and sub-continents:
Oceania Eurasia Asia Europe North America America Antarctica Africa
These will stay there throughout the website. When one of those links is clicked, say Europe we are taken to 'its' page called "About Europe". On the "About Europe: page we want links in the right sidebar menu that say:
Western Europe
Eastern Europe
Northern Europe
Etc.
When they're clicked we are taken to an "About" Page, for that menu item, which will have a new menu (say for Western Europe) in the right sidebar that says.
France
Germany
Etc
and so on.
Problem is all links go back to the same page:
Home
Create content
Blog entry
Book page
Page Story
As said previously we have created content given it the relevant parent - no joy!
Our dilemma is connecting Header links and other links to the pages assigned to them.
Does anybody know how we can get the "Save" button to the top of the page in the 'Create content pages section - this would save having to scroll back down to 'Save' after Previewing.
Thanks to all again.
You will be probably better
You will be probably better off opening a new forum topic on a new help request if you can't find the documentation, as otherwise this topic will get very diverse.
OK
Will do, thanks for the pointer
When learning Drupal I have
When learning Drupal for building sites I have found it helps if you:
1. Understand PHP (for help please see the documentation at: http://www.php.net/docs.php)
2. Understand code writing standards, CSS and HTML (Many tutorials and docs available)
3. Understand validation and web standards (See W3C documentation)
4. Understand content management and user interactivity (with a scientific approach).
5. See Drupal able as run a website in layout such as the Smithsonian and the New York Times (from one setup).
6. Stay away from installing modules, until you understand the basic core system.
7. Understand, at least the basics of, your database language and server environment.
From a programming/ designing perspective:
Drupal is sometimes very complex. However, there is a logic. And learning this logic just takes some time. It has taken me at least a couple of months, to get a basic idea of how to work with Drupal. I have also learned the CMS's Joomla and Wordpress. Both take about equal amounts to learn and understand.
From a documentation perspective:
For some reasons a lot of times the documentation content is complex. And I have found it sometimes hard to grasp the build-up of something.
Having said all that. I am currently working on a site, and everything I want to do, I can do.
I have yet to find any CMS which I could understand fully and customize in 2 days. After learning CMS's for about 2 years in total, It has had it's ups and downs, and there have been times when there was a huge question mark above my head, on the other hand sometimes when I did manage to get difficult things, for me, to work, the feeling of success is great. Once you start to understand PHP, MySQL and Apache, you realize that the sky is pretty much the limit, and you can built something exactly the way you want to. With that it helps if you know what direction to take, otherwise it can be easy to get lost or lose track of the purpose of designing the thing in the first place. I would not recommend any CMS from a designing/ programming point to start on a project that has to be done in a few days or couple of weeks. Take your time. Learn, see it as school, so if you don't have the time to learn, hire someone to do the work for you.
Overall I am very impressed by, the performance of, Drupal (otherwise I would not be using it).
From a user perspective:
Once everything is set up correctly it is breeze for the user.
Finally, a good point to keep in mind with, open source marketing in general, is to add the user level competency needed when using the software. This will help keep expectations realistic, and therefore not influence satisfaction at that level. This is something to keep in mind.
In conclusion
Feel free to jump in, if your view is different, and I you feel what I wrote could be clarified, of if you disagree.
Hope it helps
Yes, it looks a good tool
Thanks to all again
I take onboard what you are saying. When we have sorted how links connect to Pages that are different - well as above really /\ it should move ahead more strongly.
I hope a short, clear instruction ABCing how to get a simple 'your version' site up on the internet in two hours, like you can in Dreamweaver, appears sooner rather than later. This way, an intuitive process is established.
I did read in the CookBook under the heading Myths that:
"It is a pure myth that you have to know how to program (especially in PHP) to use Drupal. It doesn't hurt to have some basic knowledge of PHP, HTML and CSS but it is not required...."
Which is very encouraging
Video course
You may want to try the Drupal Essential Training video course on Lynda.com. You can get free demo access for 24 hours courtesy of Tom Geller. After that you can get a full month for $25 (less than the price of a book or any other Drupal course I'm aware of, not to mention you get "all" the content on Lynda.com). You may wish to read my partial review of the course (with some clarifications I feel are pretty important): http://www.davidnewkerk.com/book/40
Also if you'd like a more streamlined course and are willing to pay a bit more for the convenience, Lullabot has several very excellent video courses: http://store.lullabot.com
Yes, all of the same information is absolutely and completely available for free as well... but if you'd like to learn faster and not have to search for information, then I definitely recommend these courses.
Front End Drupal
I'm a little late to the game. I can't help with the menu issue but I do have general pointers for the new Drupal user.
top 3
My top 3 of things not to say to new drupal users are:
documentation
@Blah de blah
I am surprised that nobody has mentioned Emma Jane's Front End Drupal. It approaches Drupal from the viewpoint of the Designer, which means User Interface. To End Users, Site Administrators and Designers this is what Drupal is. Working out what is under the hood is step 2. You want to get from a to b, not learn to build an engine block (yet). You can also read Using Drupal for a more general introduction.
And then do start watching the Mustardseed Media video's. They're wonderful. And because Drupal configuration is not a linear proces it really helps to work through these video's. That way you can get a hang of where everything is hidden. This is especially necessary with regard to menu's, views and setting up wysiwyg and image handling.
Setting up your site
Install the administration_menu module.
The default administration interface simply sucks. But it will improve a lot with Drupal 7. An effort to get Drupal 7 administration in Drupal 6 exists in the admin module. It does make life easier but it may be difficult to follow along with tutorials, because of the new look.
Are you sure?
But stop and think before you do this: is Drupal really what you need? If you want to do some simple stuff on your site that works out of the box use WordPress or maybe Joomla (I prefer WordPress). Content Management Systems like Drupal and Typo3 are on another level. It's a bit like Paint vs Photoshop. Paint is easier to learn and often gets you further faster.
Configuration
If you are a new user and you do not have experience with Linux, getting all the modules installed and configured is a manual task that can become a hassle. Seriously, at one point it took up half of my development time to start over with a project.
To circumvent this problem I set up a virtual machine with VirtualBox and put my LAMP/WAMP/MAMP (whichever you prefer) on it. I took a snapshot of my VirtualBox with a pristine installation of Drupal. If I screw up, I can simply revert. (I've actually set up a couple of boxes). It is worth every bit of your time to learn about using the installation profiles that are available on drupal.org.
Also learn how to install and use the backup and migrate module. And test it!
If you do know Linux get to know drush. Drush is not a module. You install it seperately from Drupal.