Yesterday's Intro to Drupal class was a good one. There were about 30 people there, most of them seemed to be in relatively the same position as me--drupal newbies. Daggerhart spent about an hour and a half setting up a basic drupal site. He introduced the vocabulary as the main thing in attempting to understand how drupal works. He gave us a vocab list which I've photographed and uploaded to flickr instead of retyping.

In addition to some random notes which I'll post below he described the three main modules that need to be added that aren't in the core package in the drupal download. (not positive I'm linking to the right places. feel free to correct.)
Content Construction Kit (CCK)
Views
Panels

NOTES

SEARCH - Drupal's built-in search is not great. He contrasted a search at drupal.org using their search bar and a google search of drupal.org and google was much better. Obviously, search engine algorithms are always going to be better than what drupal comes up with.

OPEN ID - An Open ID module is available to supplement or replace drupal's user registration.

URLS - For sites (like FellowTip) which generate lots of content, you'll wanna install the PathAuto module to generate "non-node" URL paths which will help SEO. We need to do that. Notice that the page title for any page at FellowTip starts with the title of the page (subject of conversation), not the site name. In other words, it's good that FellowTip and your browser name are at the end. Drupal is good at SEO and this is one demonstration of that.

HELP - Lullabot has great screencast tutorials for Drupal.

TOOLBAR - Use the Web Developer Toolbar as a Firefox plugin.

HOSTING - A guy from www.hotdrupal.com provided refreshments. hotdrupal provides hosting specifically for drupal sites. He said it's crucial to make sure your provider keeps up with the latest MySQL releases and that you keep caching mode in normal for optimal performance.

Here's a pic of Jonathan talking and an awesomular bootleg video recorded during the presentation.

We have a resident Drupal expert contributor here at the FT. jciallella at OrangeCoat in Greenville, SC. I'm sure he could add some things to this and answer any drupalish questions.

E

--
Eric
FellowTip Founder

"The world is a better place when we share!"

I wish I could have gone. We have a very basic Drupal site setup internally here at work for a few things and honestly the hardest part I had with it was the "vocabulary"... the Nodes, etc...

I'd love to see OpenID here at FT. Maybe I should get off my butt and help.

So many possibilities for improvement, it's almost maddening to see it sit in this state! (BTW, I linked the vocab list above.)

E

--
Eric
FellowTip Founder

"The world is a better place when we share!"

I'd bet you a hamburger from Mid City Grill we could get Jonathan across the mountain to do a drupal session for GeekSouth.

E

--
Eric
FellowTip Founder

"The world is a better place when we share!"

OpenID should be a quick install and enable. So easy a Caveman could do it.

Then, users enter their OpenID username in a new "OpenID identities" tab on the "My Account" page. After this the user has the option to login either through the normal login or an OpenID option.

I've mentioned a number of improvement areas to Eric including: Pathauto for clean and meaningful URLs, meta descriptions, automatic notifications of new comments on posts, CSS aggregation, Update Status, some UI issues, submit sitemaps to the search engines, and more.

Drupal out of the box is very powerful, but usability improvements are a key focus of the future release, Drupal 7. Drupal 6 made some strides on things like reordering lists and there are nice modules out for improved front-end (user facing) interfaces. Though, in many cases Drupal hooks or templates need to be used to beat the code into the format you want.

OrangeCoat has a new product on the docket for 2009 to make professional custom Drupal templates with some of our own UI improvements, like inline editing of content and flexible grid layouts based on YUIGrids.

Jim

Yep, pretty much everything I heard yesterday was not news. Jimmy C had advised me similarly on most of that and a whole lot more in some emails. I've just held out hope that I'd have a skilled programmer working on this thing by now who could do it in his sleep.

I may give OpenID a spin. Watch out.

E

--
Eric
FellowTip Founder

"The world is a better place when we share!"

Jonathan emailed and I had down Filters as one of the three add-ons. It's supposed to be Views. I've changed it in the Summary post.

E

--
Eric
FellowTip Founder

"The world is a better place when we share!"

You have a great vision. I do not agree with all you stated, but your thoughts are definitely interesting and worth reading.
Look for apartments for rent at Amsterdam? We have got deals that include hotels in amsterdam and cheap flights to amsterdam for your comfort.