There are tons of Drupal tutorials out there - theming, modules, database interaction, taxonomy, etc. etc. Most that I find are extremely in-depth, but none give a big-picture, site-level overview.
Are there any good tutorials (videos and/or text-based) that show the creation of a simple website, with a simple administrative section? Not ridiculous reams of configuration, or complex, arcane modules...just a simple website with basic pages (i.e. about us, people, news, etc.) that are admin-configurable, and that doesn't look like the default Drupal install.
Obviously to be an effective Drupal dev, I would need to learn these ins and outs, and I certainly plan to. What I need right now though is enough of an overview to give a presentation on Drupal in several days to non-technical people on how we can use Drupal to architect their website. I've already purchased Pro Drupal 7 Development, and have perused the Drupal API docs and tutorials on their website, but these are all too micro - where's the macro?
Thanks.
Maybe the book Using Drupal is a good start for you. It's less about "How does this dark corner of the API work?" but more about tasks you need to accomplish when building a certain type of site (a blog, a wiki, an online store...).
To get you started....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmRW7FALA88
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT_TZEQEm5c
Creating a Content Type
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElXXz9-bxJc
Related
I would like to know if it is possible to integrate zen cart to Drupal 7+ ?
I know that there was a Drupal zen cart integration project http://drupal.org/project/zencart
but it seems only support in Drupal 5.x
thx!
I'm afraid it's very unlikely, efforts for e-commerce in Drupal 7 have been very firmly moved into the Commerce module which is still a wee bit unstable and without a full complement of add-ons as yet.
There's also the Ubercart module which as it happens I'm grappling with myself at the moment. It's fairly complete but be prepared to get stuck in and do some coding if you want it to do anything that's not 'out-of-the-box'.
Drupal is great as long as it is not fully ecommerce. If the site has content plus little bit of selling, then drupal is OK. If you are serious about online shopping for your site, then magneto or a paid software might be a solution.
Magneto is not totally free, the free one is not easy and it is slow.
I have experienced zencart and it is OK if you are going to use it as the main cart integrated with forum or content management systems, the integration is not always easy. zencart is badly designed for a framework point of view, examples, inserting inline css in the template doesn't allow flexibility in overriding especially if the markup output is the result of a module.
I would generally prefer to use drupal for CMS/social network, zencart for online shop, phpbb for forums.
I chose zencart because I am an experienced web developer and I can work around badly designed table-based module output. The main templates are easy to edit. check http://domainpiranha.com/customizezencart.
It is the case in all CMS framework that you have to deal with them the way they are. If you are willing to extensively customize, then programming your own software might be easier.
I have worked on websites before and always hand coded in each. But as the size of the website grew, it really became difficult to manage them. Our is a college fest website which has a number of online games (like online trading, woodstock , forex and several online quizzes ) . This year we are thinking of migrating to Drupal for this website. Would it be a good choice ?
Drupal will do a fine job of managing users and associated information about users. It will create a framework that you can leverage to integrate your games into the system.
However, the games themselves will likely need to be translated into using the Drupal API, which isn't trivial. Drupal's learning curve can be steep, particularly if you have your own style of doing things.
Having said that, Drupal is extremely flexible and is more aptly called a Web Framework than a Content Management System.
I suggest you create a test version of your site on a local install and see how it feels to try and integrate one of your existing games into the Drupal framework. You'll know quickly if you like it or not.
Drupal is flexible enough to be used for any kind of website, but it's primary focus is around content-centric social networking or community sites. It works great for content pages, blog posts, products, etc. If you are building more of an "application" (ie, a web email client, web-based games, etc),you will have more work to do, to work to customize it.
Am a beginner in Drupal.Can anyone suggest self learning websites for beginners with good examples?
some quickstart: http://www.scribd.com/doc/9740880/Quickstart-Guide-How-to-build-a-great-Drupal-website
you can find everithing in drupal planet: http://drupal.org/planet
and my third favorite: http://www.learndrupalcms.com/
It depends very much on what you define as "learning websites".
You can roughly use Drupal for three things:
Edit content in a site that someone built for you (Drupal enduser)
Set up your own site, without programming (Drupal user)
Develop your own modules, themes and such (Drupal as a development framework).
Once you have clear in what corner you want to start, I suggest looking at Lullabot, a Drupal training company. Their free content is very scattered, and not very well organised, but it offers a lot of snippets of good information. Mostly development related.
For using and configuring Drupal, there are various screencasts at Drupal.org.
For end-user there is really no good general guide. That is, because Drupal can be (and will be) configured, specialised for you. No site has exactly the same administration as another site. Such manuals should be provided by the people building your site.
I have never used DotNetNuke before. I'm thinking about giving it a try to help me build websites, and I'd like to hear from other developers who are in a position to compare DotNetNuke with other CMS's/Web Application Frameworks.
I have used both DNN and Drupal to build fairly large, content-based sites. My focus is more on the production side... UI/themeing, module configuration, etc. I'm sold on Drupal, but there may be other choices that meet your needs just as well. I just happened to work with both systems in recent months.
Drupal's core taxonomy module gives you the benefit of creating a relationship between different kinds of content. If you have "article" and "video" content types, you can easily display data from both types based on the shared taxonomy terms. This is huge and something DNN lacks.
Drupal's hook system is also a big benefit when building your own modules or creating "sub-modules" to alter or add to the default functionality of an existing module. This allows you to customize functionality or take advantage of another module's functionality as your application runs. If you purchase a module for DNN, you will have to alter the module if it doesn't meet your needs. Once you do this, you will need to update it each time there's a new release that you would like to take advantage of. DNN modules seem to be more stand-alone solutions. For example, if a DNN module has a rating system, it's only a part of that solution. With Drupal, I can use the "5 Star" rating module in my forums, my blogs, my articles, my videos, etc. There's central configuration for it and I only theme it once.
The themeing layer in Drupal also gives you a large amount of flexibility in that process. My frustration with themeing DNN sites was that I was stuck working with the markup the developer used, with no option for altering the output without hacking the module. With theme hooks and function overrides, I can change the output from those modules to meet my needs (not completely sometimes, but enough), without touching the module code itself.
The biggest problem I had with DNN modules, including some of the most popular, was just a lack of documentation or discussions available for how to achieve your goal. While Drupal's forums can be hard to navigate and you might not always find the answer you are looking for, there are many outlets for gathering information. Honestly, using DNN made me appreciate the community approach of Drupal more.
I was left feeling that DNN would be fine for building sites with more basic needs. But for that, I would still choose something like WordPress or Joomla, considering they have much larger user bases and, in my opinion, are more sophisticated.
Hope this helps you some.
DNN is a pretty good .NET solution for CMS. If you want more flexibility, I would look at SiteFinity for .NET CMS systems. This is a very flexible and elegant CMS for .NET
If you venture out of .NET and want to look at PHP solutions, then DRUPAL, JOOMLA, and WORDPRESS are best solutions. Some comments about each:
WORDPRESS - Is the simplest and most elegant CMS to work with. Originally a blogging software, it has a super-easy user interface, although that also reads as more limited power and features. It's excellent for content driven websites and templates are easily built.
DRUPAL - Is very flexible and configurable, but I find it more complicated than the others. The Admin interface requires more programming knowledge to pull off and adding components and extras is a little more complicated. But, DRUPAL has been proven in the business and government world as a secure and reliable CMS.
JOOMLA - Is my personal favorite. It is also very powerful and I prefer the Admin. interface. Joomla allows for much flexibility and has the most user created modules and plug-ins out there. You have to invent near nothing with this one. I am biased in favor of Joomla, because I use it the most. That said, it has limiting factors against DRUPAL, such as user security features. But this is being fixed in the next upgrade.
Hope that helps as well.
I have development experience using both DNN and Drupal to build content-rich websites. My preference is Drupal for a number of reasons:
Development time-line was shorter; I was able to produce more in less time.
Drupal has a larger and more active developer community. More resources are available to aid in development.
DNN is not actually a CMS. It is only a framework; Drupal is a framework with a foundational CMS.
Drupal is easier to install.
DNN modules cost money; Drupal modules are free.
Actually, I put together some notes a while back when trying to understand the architectural differences between DNN and Drupal. Found those notes, they are here: DNN versus Drupal. Hope this is helpful.
I experienced a fairly high degree of frustration when working with DNN and I don't believe I am alone in that regard. About a year ago, ASPdotnetStoreFront abandoned their involvement with DNN calling it a "disaster to work with".
I am curious to know what piqued your interest in DNN and if you have a specific website project in mind. Regardless, I wish you success and I hope this helps.
I worked in a .NET development shop utilizing Kentico CMS. I agree, it is feature rich and stable. The API and DB are documented well. Overall, it is a great CMS. There is a limited free version: http://www.kentico.com/freecms.aspx
I'm testing out DNN right now. So far, so good, but I think it depends a lot on what you are using it for. I've only been looking at it for 3 days, but so far I do find the documentation lacking or outdated.
I evaluated many of the different Portal/CMS systems out there back in 2004 and DotNetNuke ended up being my choice and I've been very pleased with it, for everything but E-Commerce, ever since. DotNetNuke is endlessly extensible, easy to skin, easy for non-technical folks to update, has a great 3rd party eco-system, and the development team is very active and talented. There isn't a great Articles module in the core but there are several really good ones available from 3rd parties for a reasonable price.
I tried using Joomla a few years ago and hated it. Wordpress is good for a blog style site but doesn't have nearly the power or flexibility of something like DNN. I am intrigued by SiteFinity, Umbraco, and Kentico for sites where all that's really needed is a CMS, but not enough that I've bothered trying them over DNN.
Another good .NET solution - from what I've read - is Umbraco.
Take a look at Kentico CMS. It's commercial, but still affordable. In my experience from dozens of projects on both CMS, Kentico is much more feature-rich, stable and well documented.
Or maybe other OS cms?
I want to form a members website, with registration, member profile and member personal photo galleries
What would you suggest? I'm pretty advanced with PHP just don't have the time to develop from scratch
I don't know much about Drupal but if you're using Joomla you may need to install something like Community Builder and/or Simple ACL. Joomla's default user management isn't great.
Drupal does what you are asking from a basic install with quite a degree of fine grained control over members, profiles, permissions etc. I have set several up with little or no extra modules, plugins or programming.
I actually run one site with several hundred members with not problems. I am not saying you cannot do this with Joomla, just have not had the experience. I think Drupal may well be more "community" oriented in this respect.
I vote for Drupal. Even Obama has voted for Drupal.
Joomla and Community Builder / JomSocial should be a nice pair.
In my experience, Drupal is far more flexible than Joomla. If you're comfortable with PHP, I'd recommend picking it.
Definitely Drupal, especially if you already know advanced PHP.
Nobody has great user features out of the box, but Drupal has more and better quality user-related modules.
Look at drupalmodules.com for 'user' modules in the 6.x versions, and you'll see tons of related modules for each one you check out.
There are modules for advanced profiles, for a percentage (of the profile) completed, user badges to make them feel special, imagecache for excellent image support, image upload with cropping, ckk and views can setup many different kinds of photo galleries from scratch so they are completely customized for your site, ubercart if you want to sell premium memberships, etc.
I think both Drupal and Joomla would be able to handle creating a basic version of what you describe. The turning point is going to be, what more you want to do.
One of Drupal's strengths is first truely uncovered when you develop. You can very easily customize the look and feel of your Drupal site. You'll have more fine grained control of both what it does and what how it outputs it's markup etc. It's a powerful tool, only downside is that it can be a bit hard to understand for normal people. But knowing PHP that shouldn't be a hindrance to you.
I already created 2 Drupal Sites and 1 Joomla Site with this Feature.
Since I've worked with Joomla some years too, I think I can give you some Hints on it:
Drupal is WAY more flexible and professional than Joomla. But you have to put some effort into it. But if you know how to use it, it will do what you want. And since Drupal itself is so flexible the core does handle almost every feature you need. So it is possible to mix a lot of features together and do things nobody has thinked of before.
If you use Joomla, you have to pick a module for this task (like CommunityBuilder http://www.joomlapolis.com/) and while this module is very powerful, it may work together with other modules, but likely it will not.