By rock69 on

Hi all! :)

I'm new to Drupal, so I still have a somewhat vague idea of what I can do with this stuff. I know PHP, SQL, and HTML pretty well, but I was looking for a better and more effecient way of managing and adding content to my web site and Drupal seems like a great choice.

I have the impression that a CMS is a little like LaTeX (I know that sounds farfetched!) in that you get to focus much more on the content, and leave the layout to the underlying system.

Now here's my question: suppose I wanted to add more stuff like, for instance, the tab links on this very own site in the upper right hand section "Support, Handbooks, Forum, ...", and so on. How would I go about doing something like that???

Or, even more important, I've got this particular database which holds valuable information, and I want to include a specific SEARCH on that data. Can I do that in Drupal?

I'd really appreciate your help. Please add links to eventual online docs, if any. That would be great.

Thanks in advance.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

Alex Schenkman’s picture

Alex Schenkman commented

Drupal is much more than separating data from layout but the best way to get to know Drupal is to explore both the core modules and the contributed modules. You will get an idea of what can be done.

Stop thinking about how you would code a specific feature, and think for a moment how to organize your data to take advantage of whats already programmed, tested and working: the modules.

It sounds trivial but it is not.

Look at these modules for example:
taxonomy
i18n
views
og
event
webform

You'll be bussy for a while, =)

Gman’s picture

Gman commented

The tabbed links are the product of the primary links ability found in the administer->menu area and the theme. The theme takes each link in the primary links menu and creates those tabs, so this can be done out of the box in Drupal with the right themes.

Depending on where you want to display the data from the custom data, it should not really be a problem since you know PHP.

Just add a new block or new content page, place the code that queries the database and displays the results. Make sure that you have the PHP filter on, instead of the normal HTML filter (otherwise the PHP code won't execute).