Introduction to Drupal

Drupal for Content Creators Rasheed Barnes Tom Deryckere

About NorthPoint http://www.northps.com http://twitter.com/NPS_Drupal

You • Name? • Years/days/hours of Drupal experience? • What do you (plan to) do with Drupal? • Expectation on the session?

We take questions!

Drupal is a CMS and more ...

What is Drupal? Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual, a community of users, or an enterprise to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website The built-in functionality, combined with thousands of freely available add-on modules. Drupal is open-source software distributed under the GPL ("GNU General Public License") and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers

What do people build • Blogs • Content Portals • Shops • Corporate sites • Publishers • Confererence sites • Media sites • Intranets • Government • Social network sites • Company websites • ...

Examples

http://www.whitehouse.gov Government

News http://www.theonion.com

http://www.drupalcoder.com Bloggers

http://www.mobiledrupal.com Bloggers

http://www.amnesty.org/ Non Proﬁt

Software http://www.musescore.org

http://eatthis.menshealth.com Media

Lifestyle http://www.womenshealth.com

Artists http://www.jenniferlopez.com/

Education http://media.mit.edu/

Why Drupal • Open Source • Stable, secure and Flexible platform • Enormous active community • thousands contributed features • ...

Why Not Drupal • Can be hard to learn • Takes some time

Who does Drupal?

3 type of drupalers • The programmer • The site builder • The content creator

Content creator • No interfacing with the code • Focussed on getting the message (‘content’) out to the world • Conﬁgures Drupal to it needs • Must work within the boundaries provided by Drupal and its modules

6 or 7

Drupal 6 or 7 • Drupal 7 will be released soon (expected end of august) • Huge usability improvements for content creators

Contents • Start with fresh Drupal install • Go through main conﬁguration pages • Cover basic terminology • Rasheed takes the challenge: “You name it, Rasheed builds it” • (not about installing Drupal)

Step 1: structure • Add some content • Create homepage • Simple menu structure

Content in Drupal • Content in Drupal is called a ‘node’ • Different ‘node’ types exist out of the box, and new node types can be created. • e.g.: • A blog post is a node of the type blog • A simple page is a node of the type page • ...

The Node • A node contains ‘fields’ that can be filled with content • Title • Body • published date (automatic) • publishing state (automatic) • Drupal allow modules and site builders to add fields to a node type (see the CCK module)

Menu • Drupal has an ‘easy’ to use menu system • ‘out-of-the-box’ • Navigation block • Primary links • Secondary links • Assign pages to menus when you create content

Look and Feel • Drupal comes with several themes • Many themes are available online • Themes consist of ‘regions’ • ex: header, left, right, content, footer

Blocks • Blocks are important elements on Drupal site that can be placed in several ‘regions’ • Blocks do not contain the main content, but enriching information or functionality.

Modules • Drupal functionality can be augmented by using several modules. • Important ones that come with drupal but are not enabled by default: • Blog, contact, path, search

Blog • Gives you a simple content type that enables you to list all blog posts • RSS feed of your blog

Comments • Commenting on all nodes

Path Alias • node/id is not SEO friendly and doesn’t look good

Taxonomy • Taxonomy = creating categories • e.g.: Blog tags, categories for • Predeﬁned categories versus real time tagging (‘folksonomy’)

Search • Enables searching content on your Drupal site

http://drupal.org/project/Modules

Thank you!

NorthPoint looks for Drupal experts /** * Implements hook_job_alter */ function northpoint_job_alter(){ northpoint_dial("212-819-1700"); }

Contact Northpoint infoUS@northps.com www.northps.com New York Oﬃce 130 West 42nd Street New York, NY 10036 Tel: 212-819-1700 @twom @nps_drupal

Introduction to Drupal

by Tom Deryckere

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Introduction to Drupal Presentation Transcript