Learning Drupal 6
For the last year I’ve been thinking about using Drupal. In the last month, I decide that it would be a potentially good fit for a couple of web projects (one work and one professional development) that I have going on. This week I started work on the simpler of those two projects: a site which is for one of my ALA groups. Getting Drupal installed is a snap. So is choosing a theme if you want to use one that already exists, either one of the default or adding one to your installation from the Drupal theme repository.
For me the challenge was understanding two things: Drupal modules and the block model that Drupal operates on. Like WordPress plugins, Drupal modules can be lots of different things from new kinds of content one can add to new ways of displaying existing content etc. The biggest thing is finding ones that do what you want and are compatible with the version of Drupal you are running. One downside to running version 6 of Drupal is that many of the modules haven’t been updated for this version yet. Still there were several modules that I’m interested in installing including:
The modules that I’d most like to see updated ASAP so that I can use them?
The block model in Drupal proved to be more challenging. Blocks in Drupal are bit of content that you add to particular regions in your layout. By default when you put a block in a region in appears there on every page. You can tell blocks to only appear on certain pages but this is a little bit more complicated. There are several different kinds of blocks but blocks don’t include the main content of the node ie. the body of a page or story, etc. Drupal provides you with an interface which highlights and names what the different regions of the template are that you can put blocks in to and allows you to select which blocks you want to put in a particular region via drag and drop. This is a little bit like the WordPress widgets interface. Understanding how all this worked took a little bit of experimentation on my part. I picked things up pretty quickly though and for a site with a single unified template I can see how this functionality and interface would work really well.
What I’m still trying to figure out is how Drupal would work for a more complicated site which has several different templates for different types of pages. I really haven’t determined this yet, but keep in mind I’ve only been working with Drupal for about a week. So my knowledge is pretty limited at this point. The more you work with a piece of software the better you learn it. Case it point, I’ve been using WordPress for my blog since 2005 and only now am starting to discover some of the more powerful content management like things I can do with it. I’m hoping as I spend more time with Drupal that I can learn more about it and use it to its fullest potential.
In the meantime, I’ve only been impressed with what I’ve seen so far. I knew that it was powerful because Ann Arbor District Library uses it for their website and I knew it could be used to facilitate group communication, collaboration and interaction (code4lib uses it for their website). What I didn’t know was how to make it do what I wanted. Granted I’m still learning that, but there is so much good stuff here that I can’t help but be excited. (If only I had more time to play!) Hopefully by the end of the week I’ll be able to point you to some of my Drupal handiwork. But that means I have to get a few more things installed and configured first.
Welcome to the Drupal world, Karen.
Sounds like you’ve gotten quite far in a week. If you continue studying Drupal with this level of determination, you’ll be on the short track to falling in love with this system :)
I can’t speak much for Drupal 6 – I’m waiting for views like everyone else, but there are a couple ways to have different layouts for different content types in Drupal 4-5.
You can create different page templates for different node types – see http://drupal.org/node/45944 … this would allow you to put the ‘right sidebar’ block here or there depending on the content type.
More likely, you’ll want to actually put different things in the different block areas depending on whatever, so you can either code this by hand or use different themes for different parts of the site.
I’ve used Taxonomy Theme in the past, http://drupal.org/project/taxonomy_theme, but my inclination now is to use taxonomy for taxonomy only.
Again, this is all for Drupal 4-5.
Thanks for the information. Good to know that you can make different pages for different node types. I can definitely put this into action to solve some issues I’m having right now. From my reading it seems you can do something similar with Blocks by only making certain Blocks appear on certain pages. But your method would make it easier to turn a 3 column layout into a 2 column layout. Good to know.
Try everything … a lot of what you do in Drupal can be temporary. I loved being able to atone for most of my mistakes when we went from 4.7 to 5.7. I’m interested in seeing what you turn out!