[documentation] Handbook Page - Drupal's page serving mechanism

[Michael Malione]

Thanks Steven and Peter,

I'll start by creating a new page and writing up my
revised walkthrough on it.  Once it's more solid, we
can decide how to merge it into the existing
documentation.  That way, I won't accidentally
overwrite any other authors on the node.

As an aside, I'm also trying to figure out the most
effective way to get to know others on Drupal.  I've
noticed that there are email lists (like this one),
discussion forums, and formal project issue tracking. 
Right now, I'm most confused about the distinction
between the mailing lists and the similar
subject-specific discussion forums, in terms of who
uses them and why.

Also, Steven, I noticed that you're in the Sacramento
area.  I'm in San Francisco, so I expect I'll run into
you sooner or later IRL, as I get more involved with
the Drupal community.

A little about me:  I'm currently working as a
contractor, responsible for adapting Drupal to work in
conjunction with an existing legacy website.  The
company would ultimately like to rely more heavily on
Drupal for its CMS needs, since the homegrown Java
Servlet/JSP solution is majorly ossified and
inflexible.  Before we can do that, I need to get
Drupal integrated transparently into the existing user
authentication system, which is my current task at
hand.

I have lots experience as an application-level
programmer (much shell scripting in my previous life
as Technical Director in the computer graphics
industry), and also as a Technical Trainer/Writer. 
I'm a perl expert, but new to PHP and mySQL, and I'm
finding the most effective way to learn about how
Drupal works is to test administer a sandbox site and
look at the source code.

As I learn more, I'll be writing up my understanding
of how everything works in more of the O'Reilly
tradition, and that's what I'll put into this node.  I
expect it will take me some time to get this down, but
I now have a place to start working.

Regards,
Mike