[support] Newbie question on concept

[J-P Stacey]

Hi,

 > I realized CMS is aimed at Blog users, and I am having tough time
> getting quick tutorials for commercial site where no Blog or News Feeds
> are needed.

I realize I'm late to this party, but as a newbie myself I've just come 
through the procedure of turning Drupal into my CMS of choice, so being 
rubbish is still fresh in my mind!

Although Drupal isn't specifically aimed at blog users, out of the box I'd 
say it *does* look very bloggy, so the confusion is understandable. The 
default theme is very much "WordPress++", I'd say. But under the hood it has 
different ways of doing things that mean you can move fairly quickly away 
from that.

My suggestions would be:

* CCK, as suggested elsewhere. You can create new content types with Drupal 
core, although they all have the same input fields. CCK provides the ability 
to create custom input fields, like dates or extra metadata.

* To get a more hierarchical structure to the site, look into the category 
module. This puts Drupal-core taxonomies into "containers": when a content 
node is tagged with a taxonomy term, it then goes into that container. It's 
a slight hack and a bit fiddly but it seems to work well.

* Get the hang of PHPTemplate, Drupal API, Drupal Form API and the concept 
of theme_* and hook_* functions early on, as it'll save you extra 
programming later. These permit you to hook up to Drupal core in your own 
templates, so you (a) don't reinvent the wheel and (b) have less hassle 
moving to a new theme later on.

* Learn about page Regions (sidebar, header, footer etc.) and the Blocks 
that go into them, and the Views you can use to automatically generate 
content for blocks.

* For your own purposes, check out Drupal's language locale support. Make 
heavy use of the t() function in your own code and you should find you can 
translate between different languages easily.

* Similarly for your own use, look into one of the more XHTML/CSS-friendly 
included themes like garland. Some themes still make extensive use of 
<table> elements for layout.

Good luck!

J-P