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
START
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)
Nodes
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
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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




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Introduction to Drupal