Drupal Training

• This post was created while working at Quiddities. The original post can be found here: Drupal Training

Getting to Minneapolis

On Wednesday, I travelled to Minneapolis from Santa Cruz to attend Drupal training by Lullabot. I travelled via feet, car, 2 planes, tram, light rail, and feet again. Who knew that one could use so many different forms of transportation to get somewhere.

What is Drupal

Drupal is a content management system (CMS). It is an extensible framework that performs the basic CMS functions and allows us to customize code. It is setup so that you can apply customizations without “hacking” the core. By not “hacking” the core, updates and security releases can be applied without losing any previous customizations.

How is Drupal Different?

There are hundreds of CMS systems available to you. Joomla and WordPress are two options available to you. If you just want a blog, then WordPress if for you. Joomla is a great CMS out of the box, but leaves little room for customizations. An alternate is to have someone develop a custom CMS for you. While a custom CMS may do exactly what you want it to do, there are several disadvantages.

• Creating and maintaining a custom CMS can be very expensive
• You or your developers are solely responsible for security patches and upgrades
• There is no development community to support your custom CMS.

One of the examples in my training compared a custom CMS to Drupal. The custom CMS is like a hand-carved wooden race car. It is very delicate, but in the end looks exactly as intended. Drupal on the other hand is like putting together a bunch of Lego pieces. Different parts do different things. The challenge of Drupal is getting all the right parts together to craft your car. All the pieces fit together to build your car, but it may not look exactly like the way you want. Sometimes in Drupal, developers struggle with making certain things perform a certain way. Unlike a custom CMS, you have to take considerations when developing a Drupal site. However, Drupal provides a solid foundation for you to build on.

Drupal Customization

Out of the box Drupal is a complete CMS that provides a content interface for editing and posting content, user authentication, and categorization. If all you need is a simple site to display content, then a basic Drupal install will work for you. You can pick a theme, download it, and install it in a couple of hours.

If you want your own design, then your site will need to be “themed”. Theming is just the process of converting your design documents to HTML and CSS. Drupal provides a powerful framework for theming that keeps the content separate from the presentation.

Now comes the fun part, customization. Drupal is extensible that you can pretty much make it do anything you want. However, customizing Drupal can be expensive if you aren’t willing to make some concessions. By taking advantage of the tools built in to the Drupal Framework and making some concessions, you can minimize the amount of development time required for your customizations.

Drupal Training

The training I attended was on API and Module development. It wasn’t exactly what I had expected but proved to validate my experience with Drupal. It also gave me an opportunity to network with other Drupal developers and learn about “giving back” to the Drupal community. I look forward to contributing more time to “giving back” to Drupal.

Leaving Minneapolis

As I leave Minneapolis, I look forward to continue building my expertise in Drupal, sharing that expertise, and giving back to the Drupal Community. Thank you Lullabot for providing the training.