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Drupal is an open source content management framework that allows you to develop and deploy simple and complex Web sites rapidly. This practical "how to" course by VTC author and Drupal expert, Trevor James, begins by showing you how to install and configure Drupal and progresses into showing you how to build functional blogs, polls, forms, podcasts, and photo galleries, and the specific modules and themes you need to use to do so. After taking the course youâll be on your way to becoming a Drupal expert and look forward to designing state of the art Web sites using this powerful open source tool. The course uses the latest version of Drupal 6.x. To begin learning, simply click the movie links.
Welcome to Introduction to Drupal. In this multi-part tutorial series, I'm going to show you how to install the open-source Framework /application called Drupal to build dynamic and rapidly deployed websites using this content-management Framework. Drupal is an open-source application that allows you to rapidly deploy and create dynamically-driven websites. It's been around for approximately between eight and ten years and it was started by a developer by the name of Dries Buytart and he was a student at the University of Antwerp and he wanted to create a community-driven, user-driven dynamic website application for his peers and colleagues at the university to communicate with each other. It's very much a precursor to applications such as Facebook and My Space and other Web 2.0 social dynamic and community-driven websites, website creation tools. Drupal is open-source which means that the code is freely available for developers to download and tweak to their liking. The only rule with Drupal is that you do not hack the core Drupal code. But the way that it's built is, is that it's modular and you can overwrite module code and theme code and easily develop your own modules and themes to use in the actual content-management Framework. There are currently two flavors of Drupal. Right now I'm at the Drupal.org website and on this website you can find everything about Drupal that you'll need to know. The Drupal.org website is the main repository for all information Drupal related. It's the community website for the entire application. It gives you the latest news and updates about Drupal, latest releases, for example. It has news items that are posted about Drupal. It has links to various support mechanisms and forums and knowledge bases and contributions from other developers and users. Download links to the actual files. The two flavors currently are Drupal 6.8 and Drupal 5.14. Drupal 6.8 being the latest stable version of the latest 6 version of Drupal and 5.14 the latest security patch and stable release of the 5 series. You can run Drupal sites in both 5 and 6, six being the preference as it's the latest development version. And then a way to log into the Drupal site. You can create an account on this site and become a member of the site for free and that allows you to interact with the forum, which is a support forum and you can go to these forum topics and see what other Drupal developers and users are posting as far as needing support or posting advice and suggestions about how to use Drupal. So by creating an account on the site, it allows you to interact with the Drupal site. You can also come to the Drupal.org website to download the various modules contributed. Hundreds of contributed modules are listed on the site and they're listed by topic. You can also come here and download multiple Drupal themes and in this tutorial series I'm going to walk you through two scenarios of actually downloading contributed modules and downloading contributed themes, installing them and using them on your Drupal sites. This is where you get that and we'll come back and look at this in much more detail later. You can search the site and you can, as I said, use the forum, go to get support, other types of support, lots of documentation on how to get started using Drupal and this Getting Started section is very good, has a lot of knowledge-based type articles, all web-based articles on how to use Drupal 6, how to use Drupal 6 to add content to your website, et cetera. So the Drupal.org site is a huge repository of everything Drupal related. There's a couple other websites out there Drupal related. One that I recommend is Lullabot. The Lullabot.com site is built with Drupal and it also has a ton of Drupal resources on it. A Lullabot is a team of Drupal developers who do training courses throughout the world on Drupal so they post information about their workshops and training and also post well-known podcasts on Drupal and articles and blogs. So check out the Lullabot site. In the second part of this particular intro tutorial I'm going to show you various websites that use Drupal as their Framework.