Iztok Smolic

I first meet Drupal when friend of mine Damjan used it on one of his project two years ago. Before that I was mostly coding HTLM and CSS for others or programmer done the rest. At that time I was aware of Smarty template engine and use it on one of friend’s home made CMS.

So when I first meet Drupal I was a newbie in PHP programming with decent skills in designing and HTML and CSS coding. I can share some of my experiences to get you on track to set up your first usable Drupal web site.

1. Choose you CMS carefully

Drupal learning curve by Dries Buytaert (father of Drupal)

Even though we can read on Drupal fan’s blogs that everything is possible with Drupal it may come as an challenge for a beginner to design and develop a small site or personal blog in Drupal.

Drupal has a very steep learning curve and it takes month to be able to take full control of the functionality and the look of the site. So in the beginning I would recommend to start with a bigger project than presentation web site or a blog. It may serve you as a training field and when you are ready you will be able set those small projects with Drupal.

2. Try not to work alone

Although this has nothing to do with Drupal it is recommended that you find a team or a partner to help you out. I haven’t meet a person who kicks asses in PHP programming and can design appealing web designs.

Drupal is not so popular in Web design community because web designers are not programmers. Most of the work in the community is done by developers and designer only come in use when Drupal is used for client – and usually they only supply PNG layouts or maybe HTML and CSS files.

Think this as a relief for you. You could make three times more projects if somebody with proper skill could support you in developing.

3. Prepare your inviroment

Clean installation of Drupal is useless. OK, you can write posts, create pages, choose another theme… but where is the cool stuff we are used from Wordpress like WYSIWYG editor, media file manager, easy admin panel,…

Drupal’s main power is behind Modules. For your first installation you should download and install the flowing ones:

• Administration menu : the default menu in Drupal installation is static, that means that you have to click your way through. This can be time consuming in the beginning because you never really know when some settings are hiding.
• Views :  you want to to list you stories on others page rather than on front page? With this modules you can get you content, links, user, etc. from Drupal database without writing single line of code. You can build pages, sidebar blocks, RSS feed or other types. You can get help on-line or use Advanced help module.
• Wysiwyg : this module does not bring you the rich text editor when installed but gives you a chance to pick you favourite and (really) simply implemented it.
• RootCandy : this is not really a module but a theme. It was designed to use it on the administration themes. When you are not multi user portals or intranets you can afford not to design administration pages with your CSS. This way you will same much time and RootCandy will be your admin theme.

This modules are not essential, but they will convince you to explore Drupal a bit more. When you get to CCK module you really see why drupal is #1 OS CMS the third time.

4. Do as Drupal do!

When I first started with Drupal I didn’t really care how my code looks and what will happen if I update my Drupal installation or modules. In Drupal you can do anything in your themes but you have to do it as the developers intend to be. MySql queries in *.tpl.php files are not something you should be doing neither altering the output HTML in module file.

All the functions going into templates and then into our Browsers can me overridden withinh template.php file. More info here.

As you see Drupal is not rocket science but you will need lots of patience and some ingenuity. If you have any question just leave a comment!