Friends. Find the Notes on Drupal By Raja.
Thanks Raja. Shrini ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Raja Subramanian <[email protected]> Date: Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 5:55 PM Subject: Re: slide or notes about drupal To: Shrinivasan T <[email protected]> Hi Shrini, Please find the Introduction to Drupal session notes: Why should you use a CMS for your website: Clean separation of content from look-feel. Content creation team creates website content, CSS/HTML designers create website theme. Syntactically correct HTML, easy Search Engine Optimization, sitemap generation, content aggregation, update notification, etc. Modules/plugins extend base functionality of a CMS to great heights. Drupal API and modules allows sophisticated functionality to be built entirely inside Drupal. Why NOT use a CMS: It may be very difficult to create some unique requirements which do not cleanly fit into a CMS feature set. A CMS makes many commonly used features very easy to implement, and some features very difficult to implement. It's essential to thoroughly understand the requirement, and if possible even change the requirements so that fits within the CMS capabilities. CMS landscape: Wordpress -- (worthy of it's own talk), exceptionally easy to create sites with static pages and blog posts. Can be used entirely by end users with minimal IT exposure. Ideal for small business, product announcement or personal websites and blogs. Drupal -- picks up where Wordpress left off. Great for medium to large websites. Joomla, MODx, RadiantCMS, etc – similar to Drupal in feature set, but probably have smaller communities. Rails/Django – some people prefer to use a web framework instead of limiting themselves within the confines of a CMS. The extra freedom is paid by the efforts in coding (no free lunch). Why Drupal: Large development and user community. Drupal Association (association.drupal.org) formalized in 2006. Drupal is here to stay. Commercial and community support available from several sources. Excellent subprojects – Drupal for Education, Drupal for Collaboration (OpenAtrium is a Drupal clone/fork(?) which focuses on team collaboration). Thousands of modules to extend Drupal functionality High profile websites use Drupal – White House, Yahoo and SUN Research, FedEx, Linux Journal,The Economist, NATO, World Food Program, Amnesty International, Green Peace UK, etc. Drupal can be cheaply deployed and is shared hosting friendly – PHP, MySQL is base requirement, certain modules also depend on Apache. Why NOT Drupal: Drupal does not have a wealth of ready made themes like Wordpress. Making Drupal sites look good takes some effort -- theming tutorial, and the Zen base theme are good starting points. Drupal's size and complexity can put off beginners. But there's plenty of online video tutorials to get you started, and several Powered by Drupal websites to get you inspired. Core Drupal concepts: Content: several content types available -- pages, blogs, forums, custom content types, etc. Navigation and menus: primary menu, secondary menu, navigation menu (typically for logged in users). Blocks: specify page elements, and how to place them together on final output pages. Themes: final look and feel Installing Drupal: Follow the Getting Started section of the Drupal documentation (drupal.org/getting-started/install) After you have setup your DB, and installed Drupal core, it's time to enable and install some modules. Core modules to be enabled -- "Path" and "Upload" module. You can enable modules after logging in as admin and select Modules from the Navigation menu on left. Don't forget to setup cron as per the installation docs. Install the drupal shell (drush) to simplifying module installation (see more-beer-less-effort video below). Essential Drupal modules for every site: Path (core module): create meaningful permanent URLs for your pages. Aggregator (core module): used to pull RSS feeds from other sites and display them on your site. Ping (core module): notify other sites whenever content on your site changes. notewords: set default and custom meta tags for every page/post/content. sitemap, xml_sitemap: can submit sitemap in xml format to search engines. google_analytics: track visitors using Google Analytics. boost: high performance Drupal cache, note: incompatible with mobileplugin. domain, mobileplugin, wurfl: detect mobile browsers and redirect them to mobile version of your site. trigger, rules, action: these modules allow you to build custom workflows for your content. CCK, Views: these two modules allow you to construct custom content types, and render them online. CCK and Views offer excellent flexibility and power to Drupal. Eg. for a real estate website, you can construct a CCK object for every property with all the necessary fields (address, photo, sq ft area, price, etc) and use Views to input the fields (HTML forms) as well as list them online in various ways. For online shops, the ubercart module offers a full blown ecommerce solutions. References: Drupal Hand Book -- www.drupal.org/handbook Open Atrium -- drupal for intranets and team collaboration -- www.openatrium.com Websites powered by Drupal -- www.slideshare.net/agnian/high-profile-websites-powered-by-drupal Implementing Drupal, Google Tech Talk (video) -- www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfrfuCLH9sg (this is the video which convinced me on drupal) Drush, More Beer Less Effort (video) -- developmentseed.org/blog/2009/jun/19/drush-more-beer-less-effort (must watch video :-) Drupal video tutorials -- www.gotdrupal.com - Raja -- Regards, T.Shrinivasan My Life with GNU/Linux : http://goinggnu.wordpress.com Free/Open Source Jobs : http://fossjobs.in _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
