By fthomas on

I've recently installed drupal, and I am impressed by what I see, but man, am I having issues just rapping my brain around the install setup after installation and such. There is lots of docs on the drupal website, but I at the best of times cannot make heads nor tails of it. Seems to be either random information or too little! So, what I'm asking for it a resource to learn drupal and how to administrator it properly.

Thanks,

Frank.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

chx’s picture

chx commented

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/osource/index.html
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drupaceous’s picture

drupaceous commented

there's a steep learning curve, because imo there is no good documentation (yet). I think that the documentation is too much organized as a community, someone writing a comment here, maybe put it in a handbook page, somebody else offering a code snippet etc. . There's no good structure, and a lot of stuff is undocumented. That's not a complain, just something I realize after using drupal for a month.

Abilnet’s picture

Abilnet commented

Everyone knows that there's not such a thing than "a free lunch" ...however, Drupal is quite near of it ;)

Maybe one of the most usefull documentations are the Drupal Handbooks at http://drupal.org/handbooks ...and the Lullabot Podcasts at http://www.lullabot.com/podcast ...just sit back and look & listen (take a look at the links on left)

annoyed’s picture

annoyed commented

just in case you missed the link at the bottom of the IBM article:

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/library/i-osource5/

go through all the examples in the article - it's the best way to understand and learn

bart@drupal.energybulletin.org’s picture

bart@drupal.energybulletin.org commented

Two good books have been published
See http://drupal.org/node/66199

After reading those books, the online Drupal articles make more sense.

fthomas’s picture

fthomas commented

Boy some of you were reading my mind! Part of my question should have been ,do I have to purchase a book to get some idea of what's going on here? Being in the Information Technology field, documentation is always the last thing to be provided. I realize that drupal is free, but one has to remember, even if it's free, it can still be useless without proper instruction.

But saying that, that's for the links, and I will consider picking up one of the drupal books from amazon to help this newbie on the learning curve.

Also, I must say that the power of a tool is usually equivalent to the complexity of the tool. Drupal seems to be no exception to this rule. It would be interesting to see how far drupal can be stretched before there is no more room for growth. Would be interesting.

Thanks to all, and I will keep coming back to this thread to see if there is any more comments or good posts. BTW, thanks for the IBM posts!

Frank.

scifisi’s picture

scifisi commented

I came across an excellent post, I think it sums it up really. Drupal is not for the faint hearded it's true, but there is a lot of support here, some really solid code and now that I have become a full time 'Drupaler' I'm here to stay.

Read this and I think you will understand where a lot of us are coming from.

http://www.caspianit.co.uk/learning-about-drupal/

randyjkoch1’s picture

randyjkoch1 commented

has everyone forgotten the lost art of teaching someone simple logic. Walk me from the basics to the finished product. Know one around this drupal world seems to understand this. Ok I pick out the theme and I tell you I know nothing. when you tell me drupal is easy than I expect someone to a: tell me how to go from a-z and show me every step of the way with examples. b: dont start your geeky little videos's (fusion theme is a great example) in the middle of a built site and expect a beginner to understand anything. MY God I would be happy just to know what the left menu bar is for. It says admin and a bunch of other stuff but i want those buttons for selling stuff. I am so frustrated I could strangle the drupal founders and anyone who says "oh its easy" . If I hear easy or simple one morre time I'll explode.

randy@allhvacr.com

kevin.wang5000’s picture

kevin.wang5000 commented

I found a video based learning series that made learning Drupal easy.
I just got it last week.. and its great so far, but I'm curious about whether
the advanced series will also be good.
I got mine from beginlearningdrupal.com
I'm a newbie with low attention span :)