How Long Did It Take You?

I've been using Drupal for about a year now (started last January) and I'm definitely still a novice. However, I've developed custom modules and feel comfortable with the general structure of Drupal. The great thing about Drupal is that you can get a great website up and running within an hour without knowing the inner workings. I started off using Wordpress and then found Drupal and fell in love with the flexibility that it provides me. I'm just a hobbyist (hoping to freelance soon) so I only get to spend a couple hours a week on my work. The best investment I made was purchasing the book Pro Drupal Development (http://www.drupalbook.com/) it takes you through the inner workings of Drupal, custom module development, theme development, and much more. After reading that book I wrote my first module and understood how Drupal worked under the hood. Things "clicked" after that for me. I think the next step in my Drupal progression would be to begin contributing to the actual Drupal development itself. I hope this helps a little bit. If you have any other questions don't hesitate to ask because there are plenty of knowledgeable people in the Drupal community.

Good Luck!

I don't think what Matt (portablecow) said is representative of someone coming into Drupal without knowing anything.

Writing modules in php after reading a drupal book? I don't think so! Loving the flexibility drupal gives you? Drupal is *only* flexible if you know css and php. If you don't, then you are totally stuck with the output that the modules and themes give you; the only flexibility you may have is choosing which combinations of modules you use, and which Views and CCK-fields you set up.

Matt has only asked three questions in 44 weeks. Take a look at my tracker for a more realistic journey into Drupal - 36 pages of questions, starting off with a totally noob 'can drupal do this?' query.

I started using drupal a year and forty weeks ago (although only a year of that has been actively using Drupal - every month I have to stop for a couple of weeks because I'm too busy in my full time job), and I *really* knew absolutely nothing. I've spent 700-1000 hours in total, 80 full working days, trying to learn. Granted, about 15% of that has been writing in the forums as already mentioned, and a couple of dozen was learning about VPS hosting. Another couple of dozen hours was spent on photoshop skills. And about three hours was going through CSS tutorials (CSS is an abysmal invention - I absolutely hate it; it makes no sense to me, and nothing I try to do ever works. I've wasted tens of dozens of hours trying to overcome CSS problems). The rest was working with Drupal and testing modules.

I've worked on three websites during that time - my 'vehicles for learning'. One is a large, complex, multilingual school website which is still not live because of so many problems with bugs and flaws in the modules and core that I'm not able to fix - I really shouldn't have started with something so big, but I thought Drupal was going to be a hell of a lot better and easier than it turned out to be. Another is a personal family website, which will remain unfinished until the school site is live. Another was a small, basic business website which has just gone live after 120 hours of development; it still needs a ton of things done to it, but it is usable.

I remember my main mistake when starting Drupal was too read too much. For instance, I spent my first twenty hours reading about 'taxonomy' - I learnt nothing useful and ended up completely confused. However, during just a handful of hours of playing with it, it became quite clear. After that slow start, I'd say that using a hands-on approach I was comfortable with core after about 30-50 hours. It took me a couple of hundred hours to research and test the first twenty to thirty add-on modules. The school site currently has forty add-on modules installed.

My second mistake was more costly. After grasping the idea of taxonomy, I assumed it was more complex, powerful and robust than it actually was. I also thought it would dovetail and permeate into other aspects of Drupal core. So I designed the school website heavily around it; teachers, classes, departments, annexes. Then I found out it is actually extremely basic, and had to scrap the first design concept and start again. The same happened for permissions, file-handling, language, menus, multimedia and wysiwyg. I over-estimated Drupal's ability at everything, and wrongly assumed competence, stability, good design, broad application, and usability throughout. I kept having to back-track and re-do parts of the sites when I discovered the flaws and serious limitations.

My aim in the next two years (1500-2000 hours) is to do another three or four 'demo' sites whilst also concentrating on trying to learn css and php. At the end of this time, I'd like to be able to have a go at writing a module, and doing a theme from scratch.