Training: Introduction to Drupal

Facilitated by Courtney Miller, Floatleft.org

Courtney will take learners through all of the core Drupal concepts, from installation and configuration to modules and themes. This will be a question-driven training, and participants are encouraged to bring their questions and curiosities.

Intro to Drupal

Drupal has a large and committed developer community The expansion possibilities are exciting

Challenges: terminology and ramp up time commitment

Find people interested in Drupal via groups.drupal.org (http://groups.drupal.org/)

Browse groups by interest

Three types of Drupal users: End users Administrators Site Builders

Drupal can create static pages or dynamic pages, static pages offer viewing/editing of content

In Drupal the viewing/editing and administration are combined

WYZYWYG editor is a plug-in (Tiny MCE, which is free - http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/ )

Content = title, body and other configuration options, ability to attach files, etc.

Drupal comes with default templates, with an option to download other templates

Themes themes are composed of multiple template files themes can be customized

Almost all the modules for Drupal are free

Joombla tends to have more paid options

There is a major new release of Drupal every year, and newly contributed modules are routinely available

latest release is Drupal 6.0

Available modules are categorized and Drupal users can review: description, features, group sponsorship, plus support and current issues.

Drupal installation requires PHP MySQL Apache

Drupal installation notes: Install to the root directory of the web server Copy files to server Define database installation (user/password) Grant write access to do set up After set up, undo write access

There is a master admin account which has All permissions

Clean URLs – this is an option in Drupal (hides/replaces question marks, etc.) supports SEO

The admin area is on the left on the default home page

Key configuration items are listed under the Site Builder Header

Blocks = types of content

Block regions are easy to configure

User can define blocks or use default blocks

Admin can control which pages display which blocks

Page types Static – no date dependency/association Dynamic – date dependency/association

Reviewed building menus

Rights – a user is assigned a role and a role is assigned permissions.