Hi, In the message quoted below you talked a lot of having to make ones own code to get around in Drupal. I know i'm a newbie to all this CMS stuff and i consider myself an idiot when it comes to programming in any shape or form even though i know a tiny little bit about Javascript but not enough by far to get around, partly because i have a terrible memory for syntax, so my question is do i really need to know about programming to be able to manage Drupal? I chose to go with a CMS because as a blind person it can be quite tricky to do layout and contents that looks desent and more atractive than working in a standard html editor, but if you have to learn how to hack in order to manage this, maybe it's time to think again. /Krister
J-P Stacey wrote:
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