Introduction to Drupal

As I mentioned in the Welcome message, this course is like a hop-on-hop-off city tour. On our tour, this week is the equivalent of stopping at The Louvre for just a quick peek. This week is all about Site Building. You could spend the rest of your Drupal career here.

 

Read my “How to Learn Drupal” document if you are not sure what Site Building is. This is the bulk of the work involved in setting up Drupal websites. For those of you experienced with Drupal, this may seem basic. However, for new Drupal users, understanding these basics is very important.

There are probably hundreds of articles and tutorials about creating content types on Drupal alone. My intention was that with the absolute minimum of tutorials I could give participants a reasonable introduction to Drupal. However, I have found that we have a mix of people who are absolutely new to Drupal, and those who have a little bit of experience. To that end, I have included both "Introductory" and "Intermediate" activities. I'll leave you to judge which you fit into! You don't have to complete them all, just try the two that you think you'd benefit from. (of course, go ahead and do them all if you can!)

After you complete the task, please post a link to your finished work into the Week 2 Discussion.
http://p2pu.org/webcraft/introduction-drupal/discussion/week-2-discussion
Then, see if you can 'peer to peer' help each other with the activities.  Prepare any questions for the Wednesday webinar session. Even if you can't make it, we can talk you through your questions. 

Download PDF: Go to this page, and click on the “Sample Chapter” button to download the PDF.

https://www.packtpub.com/drupal-6-site-blueprints/book

By: Timi Ogunjobi

 

This tutorial is a chapter from Drupal 6 Site Blueprints. It’s a free chapter of the book. I like it because it’s perfect for the “how do I… “ types of questions. 

 

Please ignore references to the Poormanscron module and the "theme" for this tutorial. This tutorial is good because it shows you something you can get done relatively easy with some of the built in features of Drupal. 

View: Creating a Simple Link List with CCK and View

By: Bob of Mustardseed Media

 

This tutorial video which covers how to make a links list using Views and CCK. It shows related modules to configure, as well. It's a basic introduction to the Views 2 interface and would be useful for a beginner. Because you're using Acquia Drupal, you will need to install two modules

View: CCK Nodereference Screencast

By: Geoff Hankerson

 

This tutorial assumes you have make a CCK content type. It shows how you can extend the functionality of CCK. This video on CCK node reference by Geoff Hankerson starts with setting up a basic CCK content type and then demonstrates how to use CCK node reference; and it covers node theming as well.  In order to follow the example (using dprint_r() for example) you will have to install the devel module.

View: How To: Using View's Arguments

By:  Matt Petrowsky of GotDrupal

 

This tutorial assumes you have experience making Views. This video demonstrates using arguments in Views to control the display of content. What's an argument? An argument passes a query to a view through the URL. For example:

In this case, '3' is the argument, a user ID. The argument tells the view to display the posts of the user 3.