It’s easy to label something as terrible if you’ve had a bad first impression. Before you do label the CMS/Technology with the sh*t sticker you should have some sort of idea on how it works and how to use it.
Drupal is a CMS backed by a strong community and a large amount of modules to build the site you need in an easy and effective way. It’s broken up into two main areas, modules & themes which when used in the correct way proves to be very powerful.
Initially when starting with Drupal I wasn’t a fan, it’s like a nice liquor, it gets better with age. Plenty of guides are available to help.
Like any good technology it comes with documentation on how to use it, read before you jump in.
Developers
- http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal – This is a great guide to understand what can be overridden, using this and Devel (Module) can prove to be very powerful.
Themers
- http://drupal.org/documentation/theme – Overview and guide of the theming engine + where to start.
Helpful tips
- http://www.lullabot.com/ – Absolute Gods! Some amazing articles & tutorials come out of these lot.
- Drupal’ search isn’t the best, using modules to enhance is recommended if you’re going to rely heavily upon this functionality.
- Fuzzy Search – http://drupal.org/project/fuzzysearch
- Apache Solr – http://drupal.org/project/apachesolr – Extremely powerful & fast! It can be difficult to customize though.
- Having issues? Google/Stackoverflow or hit up the community for assistance:http://drupal.org/community
- TDD with Drupal – http://www.lullabot.com/articles/introduction-unit-testing
- http://drupal.org/coding-standards – Follow the standards! If you decide to one day give back to the community make sure you’re following Drupal coding standards, otherwise you may get shot down.
- Great tutorials – http://drupalize.me/
Recommended standard build
- Views – http://drupal.org/project/views – This is a great module to automate listing pages including handling of pagination & ajax integration to enhance usability. It allows for dynamic displaying of content.
- Webform – http://drupal.org/project/webform – Create your contact form and questionares with ease. Plenty of hooks also available to customize if required.
- Mollom – http://drupal.org/project/mollom – Prevent bots and people spamming your forms. Very powerful & smart service.
- Pathauto – http://drupal.org/project/pathauto – Take control of your URL’s intergrates into several other modules.
- CKEdior – http://drupal.org/project/ckeditor – Powerful WYSIWYG editor.
- Devel – http://drupal.org/project/devel – Helpful when it comes to overriding functions and developing for Drupal, both for Developers + Themers.
- Imagecache / Actions – http://drupal.org/project/imagecache_actions http://drupal.org/project/imagecache – This is now apart of Drupal 7 (Image Styles), allows for customization of images on the fly. Great for adding borders, overlays etc without CSS.
Extras
- Rules – http://drupal.org/project/rules – Allow users to define events based off actions.
Give back to the community!
