As was promised last time, I am back again with a sneek preview of the second article of Drupal that was published in October Issue of LFY (Linux for you) magazine, one of Asia’s largest circulating open source magazine. I think Dheeraj did a fantabulous job with the second one which was a continuation of the first article in LFY.
If the last article was all about orientation, installation and basically getting a first hand information of Drupal, the second article is all about getting involved with Drupal. So we get some basic understanding of the terminologies of Drupal (being a non-geek, i am still to get hold of what is node, hook and taxonomy… arrgghh!!!)
With a focus on “Doing it yourself” – the article sure does help a lot of the budding programmers who want to just get started with Drupal. The article also gives a first hand information on how to enable a feature by installing a contributed module (Drupal provides some basic functionalities through the core and default modules but some advanced features can be done by simply installinga module through the Drupal.org/project/Modules page.
Configuring and managing blocks is another important topic that is covered in the article. As you know, “Blocks are the navigational or content additions that generally live on the left or right side of a page when you view it in your browser” – from drupal.org. You can learn to organize content such as placing a ‘Who’s New section’ on the right hand side bar or maybe relocation the ‘Who’s Online’ section at the bottom of the home page.
The article concluded with an introduction to managing menus on your drupal site with easy to learn steps for adding, deleting and altering menus on the site.
The article reminisces me of our workshop which we conducted at SVNIT, a famous technical college. A student of Engineering (Final Year) came before us and started to ask questions regarding Drupal and how one can ‘Add Modules’ and use the different features. Although students know Drupal, still they are not able to use it and i believe this series of Drupal articles in LFY can go a long way in filling this void.
Dheeraj told me that the next article would focus more on Drupal Directory structure, user access permissions and designing your own content type. I hope that you must have got excited by now, so what are you waiting for, grab a copy of LFY OCT’08 issue today and wait for the December issue to come.