Introduction to Drupal

1. I'm looking to learn Drupal so that I can use it to create sites for others so it's likely that the project needs will always be changing. But, so far, it seems that Drupal really excels when dealing with a lot of different content. I could see it being really useful for educational and news sites in particular.

For example, take the variety of content that an educational institution might need to work with. For the administration, you may want to let them easily add events and all kinds of informational pages. Instructors would need a place for class announcements and supplemental material. For students, you may want to add a forum or community aspect as well as the ability to upload finished assignments to a repository. So far, it seems like Drupal might be the best CMS to deal with the varying content coming from these separate groups of people.

2. Nothing stands out as being confusing per se. But, coming from another CMS (Wordpress), the admin area is definitely brand new and will take some getting used to.

3. As I already said, I'm really interested in setting up and managing all kinds of custom content types and taxonomy (since we ARE dealing with content management above all else). I'm also excited to dig through the modules to see what's already available. And, finally, I'd like to check out the module system itself and how to create a module, should the need arise.

4. I'll probably be doing most of my work offline because I find it easier, but here's the sandbox I created at webenabled:

http://tapes7.dev3.webenabled.net/

So far, I'm thinking that I'll stick with my example above and create a site for a fake school of some kind.

P.S. P2PU.org is using Drupal aren't they?

I spent about an hour completing the other tasks, then about another doing #2, looking at an existing Drupal site. That does not count this write-up.

• I decided to look at the case study for WePlayGroup, a social networking site for parents (OK, moms) of small children, encouraging them to find neighbors and form play groups.
• One thing of interest in the design is how it uses the Location and Gmap modules. Members, play groups, activities, and restaurants ar all tagged somehow by their locations (maybe just ZIP codes). I would like to see how this works from the user's point of view and how to implement it.
• It depends on how you count. The central content of the site I am designing for my local Boy Scout troop is the calendar of events: weekly troop meetings, monthly trips, and other activities. The calendar requires several sub-features:
  • attachments (permission slips, equipment lists)
  • taxonomy (is the event a weekly meeting, a trip, or other?)
  • sort and slice and display various selections: monthly calendar, upcoming events, group by taxonomy, ...
  • Share via Google calendar, Outlook, or other calendar software.

  Another important feature is user management. I want to keep track of contact information and display a troop roster. I want to give different users different permissions on the site. I want to let the general public contact us without displaying our e-mail addresses publicly. I want to design surveys for users to fill out.

• My sandbox on WebEnabled is http://feline.dev3.webenabled.net/ It seems to me that the Web never has enough photos of kittens, and I intend to do something about it!

One question I have for right now: I am having trouble when synchronizing the calendar on my web site with iCal on my Mac or with Google calendar. I have some events (trips) that last for several days. I would like them to show up as "all day" events, with no particular time. Instead, they show up as starting at 12:00 AM one day and running until 12:00 AM some later day. On the other hand, some events actually run from 7:30 to 9:00, so I cannot just save all dates as days with no hours, minutes, nor seconds. What to do? I am using CCK, Views, Date, and Calendar modules.

Hi all - here are my notes from today I have posted them to my homepage dev site

http://pixelz.dev3.webenabled.net/node/2

* Link to your chosen case study page on Drupal.org.

http://www.43folders.com/. I've referenced this site quite a bit and only just discovered that it was built on Drupal. As a blog, the site does an impressive job of inviting readers to navigate non-linearly and find related content.

* What's confusing or compelling? A sentence describing something that made you wonder: "how'd they do that?!"

Content is featured in links at the top and bottom of the page with snappy design.

* List the top 3-5 features you would like to know how to develop in Drupal.

Aggregating and organizing content from multiple authors/users.
Automating when content gets featured and how.
Presenting media drawn from a database, and keeping that database sanely organized.
Getting Drupal to play nice with JavaScript.

* Link to your sandbox:
http://ida.dev3.webenabled.net/

Enjoyed today's presentation. I'm still getting caught up in this course so my posting is a bit late (been a busy couple of weeks so far).

I'm impressed by the Leffe beer site, http://www.leffe.com/en

I like how the site maintains a consistent branding with it's corporate font forming the headings for all the sections/modular components. I also like the integration of flash in the choice of beer selections--or is this another mudule? Hmm?

I'm particularly interested in using Drupal for:
1) Rapid Website development
2) Seamless appearance--understanding that the page is composed of modules yet I don't want it appear blocky.
3) Knowing how far I can go (and what I can promise to clients) without having to break out of the sandbox and create my own webapp. Related to this is understanding "best practices" of how others develop web-sites quick, easily and attractively.

My sandbox site is at: http://daryle.dev3.webenabled.net/

I liked the suggestions you all shared and Doug's highlighting of some of those suggestions in todays webinar. Thanks.

And good luck Benji on getting more kitten pics on the web.

For myself, I am a College IT professor. My background is more in web-enabled database solutions. I haven't done any HTML for quite some time but want to get ready to teach CMS to students as well as build up my own consulting practice again.

And thanks Heather for your work, late nights, and patience in trying to get us all on board with this course.

I apologize to the commmunity here for being so laggard in my first posts. I have been very busy but I have been watching the videos, reading the material and keeping up as a lurker with this class. My participation will become more evident as week two begins.

It is extremely difficult for me to pick just one site that impresses me most or that I might use as a base. There is so much going on right now in the Drupal community that is impressive. I did narrow my choices down and my selections are based on visual structure, informational structure, eye candy and ease of use. I am pretty impressed with these three sites:
http://piecesinc.com/ pieces is unique with their navigation and is unique for an ecommerce site - pretty too.
http://www.goingon.com/ goingon has a very nice, clean visual layout.
http://amnesty.org/ amnesty is very much visual candy for me, lots of visual fun going on all over the front page. almost a non-reading format, just follow your mouse and eyes.

I am a closet fan of the work produced by developmentseed.org and have played a little bit with managingnews. I have learned a tremendous amount from being a participant in the Drupal Open Garden Project hosted and taught by Chacha Sikes. The site remains open for others to read and see the activity that happened during the summer at http://garden.localbiology.org/

My sandbox is here: http://james.dev3.webenabled.net/

Hi all... I'm catching up with the course after having been on jury duty last week.

My Case Study of Choice is http://adsoftheworld.com/taxonomy/media/tv I’ve been heavily into the media world ever since I learned how to black and white reel to reel videos in the second grade…and given my interest in improving the Drupal Dojo… I was drawn to the Ads of the World example, a site cataloging adverting from around the world making them searchable by format, region, country and industry. Enabling users to rate and discuss them—seem to be user friendly, functional, with a solid design, and nice features.

Recreating this could be a good challenge. It looks like a complex view with a lot of theming work and other modules associated with rating not to mention, transcoding media perhaps with a media mover module, but more likely some custom ffmepg processing and custom content types. It would definitely be a challenge for me to attempt to recreate this, but it would be a great step forward for the Drupal Dojo if I was able to.

I built a site in Drupal Gardens and know how to use firebug and command line to search for and change values but I’m not a themer.

The top 3-5 things I had on my list include, Drush, views, work-flow, and multi-part forms.

I've set up a sandbox for this class: http://p2puej.dev3.webenabled.net

Added a blog and started tracking configuration changes (posted on home page) - Interested in looking at automatic logging modules. Didn't get to backups or SVN yet.

If any one is interested in working with media, work flow or task management types of questions, please let me know.