By Kudos on

We have a community webpage and the main guy who takes care of the technical related issues quits on us stating that he can't find time to continue to do so. I have minimal experience with website developing/maintaining and would like to learn more. He used Drupal and currently the website is running Drupal 5.1. I would like to continue to use Drupal but need to learn it. Where and how do I start?

Thank you very much for your time.

Comments

apmsooner’s picture

apmsooner commented

www.lynda.com is a good resource for training. Its very cheap and they have some basic video tutorials on drupal without getting into anything to crazy technical. If you're wanting to add any functionality over and above what you have, you may want to look into updating your installation to the latest version of drupal 6.15.

Kudos’s picture

Kudos commented

Thanks.

Are there fundamental differences between Drupal 5 and Drupal 6 except for themes and interfaces? Should i familiarize myself with Drupal 5 first before moving on to Drupal 6?

I have not even installed Drupal onto my own server and monkey around with it. I hope the learning curve will not be very steep.

einsteinsboi’s picture

einsteinsboi commented

There are definitely differences between D5 and D6 both in themeing and modules. If you plan to upgrade the website to Drupal 6, which is an excellent idea, I would recommend that you first make sure you know what modules he used for the current website and make sure there are Drupal 6 versions of them. If there are custom modules it's doubly important to test them on a Drupal 6 install to make sure they'll work. You should also test the theme. You can do all this by backing the website to your laptop or computer and then doing a test upgrade to Drupal 6 and testing it thoroughly.

apmsooner’s picture

apmsooner commented

The main thing is that drupal 5 is inevitably not going to be supported eventually which means any modules you might have problems with, you will likely be hardpressed to find help in the forums to fix. Any new modules are not going to have a drupal 5 version either most likely. Personally, I would maintain your drupal 5 site as is and learn and build a completely fresh site with the latest version of drupal 6 assuming you want to dive in and take it on. I have found there are alot of bugs in drupal 5 modules that were never fixed therefore limiting the power of what you can do pretty easily with drupal 6 with little to no programming knowledge. Theming drupal is also another advanced area to think about but if you know a little css then you can fairly easily modify some of the free themes available to meet your needs and probably create something pretty similar look and feel to what you already have. The overall learning curve seems overwhelming but i suggest installing drupal and the most popular modules like cck, views, etc... and just learn a little as you go. I think you will be surprised how easy it really is after some practice.

apmsooner’s picture

apmsooner commented

One other thing you might want to be aware of is the underlying system running your current site. It is important to know for instance what version of php is running on the server for your site because some modules won't work with older versions and if there was any custom code created on your site, you could definitely have some issues on a newer version of drupal. Again, if you really want to learn, I would suggest not taking the risk of breaking your current site by working directly in it. Instead, download and install the latest drupal to your own server or to a cheap web host and figure it out a good plan to recreate your new site. Best of luck!

Kudos’s picture

Kudos commented

Thank you for all of your advices.

Between the long working days that are completely unrelated to any of these, I'm trying to learn this. It is overwhelming !

Please forgive me if my questions are so basic. Could I, with administer access, see if he had done some custom coding for the site? And how? I did roam around the Site Building, site configuration section but did not see anything as custom coding. Is it because I can't see it as an administer ?

thanks.

einsteinsboi’s picture

einsteinsboi commented

wow, not sure if there's a simple way to do this, others may know the answer. Short of downloading the site files and then using a file-comparison utility to compare the contents of the files with the ones in a clean Drupal install using the same theme and the same modules, I'm not sure there's a simpler way to do it. There might be a module out there but I have no idea if there is.

Is it not possible to ask the guy if he made any changes? Unless it was an acrimonious departure he may be willing to share the information with you of what he changed. How complex is the website?

apmsooner’s picture

apmsooner commented

I agree with the other comments that you should probably ask the original developer if there was any custom php coding involved with the creation of the site. My strongest recommendation to you to learn drupal is to at least try a 1 month subscription with lynda.com and take the drupal video tutorials. It cost $25/month with no contract. I have absolutely no affiliation with them but I attest that I owe most of my education for various software to them. There are some free tutorials out there as well that are really good so feel free to jump into those later on but in my opinion there is no better option then lynda.com to get all the base knowledge. If there are any other training options out there that cover the depth of material at such a low cost... please tell me!

tdimg’s picture

tdimg commented

Search the net for Drupal Dojo. You should also read the documentation found on here very carefully as well as considering buying a Drupal book.

You should set up a local server for testing/learning, Xampp (found at apachefriends.org) or WampServer are easy to install.

Do never change something on your running system before you haven't tested it in a test environment. So one of the first things you should do, is to replicate your running system, use the module Backup&Migrate (http://drupal.org/project/backup_migrate) for the database and download all files from your server.

Kudos’s picture

Kudos commented

Thanks.

I have a 40 GB labtop computer, would that be enough memory to do what you've stated above (creating a back up system on my own computer and testing/playing with it) ?

tdimg’s picture

tdimg commented

40GB is most likely your hard drive, not your memory, I guess that's 1GB. Should be enough when your on WinXP, it might get slow when you give Drupal a lot of work to do

Kudos’s picture

Kudos commented

Thanks.

einsteinsboi’s picture

einsteinsboi commented

Before you spend money on books or anything like that, check out all the free resources on the web and learn as much as you can from them. Here's a few to get you started:

http://drupal.org/handbooks
http://codingpad.maryspad.com/beginner-tutorials/
http://gotdrupal.com/ - free and paid stuff
http://www.lullabot.com/ - free and paid stuff
http://drupaltherapy.com/screencasts - free and paid stuff
http://www.masteringdrupal.com/
http://learnbythedrop.com/
http://mustardseedmedia.com/podcast

Kudos’s picture

Kudos commented

Thanks for the "boat-load" of info. I'll look into it.

kaakuu’s picture

kaakuu commented

Good info. Keeping myself subscribed.