Technology Programming

Simplifying Drupal Development Services

Drupal is very powerful and flexible. That means it must have a significant degree of complexity. In fact, Drupal is easy, but many people make it harder than it has to be by thinking they need to understand everything at once. Terminology is necessary in order to properly convey what one is trying to say or ask. If you talk about "that box-like thingy on the right side of my screen" you could be referring to many things. Contrast that with "the Author Information block in the right sidebar" - now you are precise and everyone knows exactly what you mean. You've told them what it is, where it is, and even how it got there and part of how you've styled it. Start by trying to understand the basic parts of Drupal, don't try to understand everything at once. For example, it is imperative that you know what a node is (look in my book). Then understand what content types are. Learn the basic parts of the rendered page (header, footer, left and right sidebars, and the center, or content areas). Check out the administration pages so you have some idea where things are, even if you don't understand them all today. It's all fine and good to have "MySpace" as your target, but you are one person with a new tool. The people that put that together are many and using tools that they already were familiar with. Just start by getting something up and visible. Then celebrate that you've done that. Now you're ready to move on to more wonderful things, but do it one step at a time.

Don't add tons of modules right away; get comfortable with what you have. Add modules one at a time and get familiar with them - one at a time. As for making Drupal easier and more logical, you're welcome to submit feature requests or explain why something is not done in the most logical manner. But don't demand it, or threaten to abandon Drupal if you don't get it your way. And certainly don't resort to name calling or derogatory comments.

The menu or navigation system, can make or break a web site. There is a lot of content on the Drupal site on menus. For beginners it can be very confusing to understand the difference between menus and categories. The menu is a navigation system and categories is a system to order content data. So menus is to arrive at content and categories to order it. Initially to understand Drupal well, you have to see these as two separate things.

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