As an experienced web designer/developer used to quickly building sites with HTML/CSS and PHP, I found it quite frustrating to learn Drupal at first. I found the documentation on drupal.org to be disorganized and too many pages to wade through to find the information that I needed. And the more I learned about the intricacies of building sites with Drupal, the more complicated and daunting the learning process became. I discovered that some things that HTML does easily like handling images and different file-types such as video is not built-in to Drupal and there are various ways to do it which provides a lot of flexibility. But for the new user, having too many choices is not a good thing.

I received wise advice from Drupal developers. Start going to Drupal Users Groups. I attended the Vancouver Drupal Users Group and bravely asked my Newbie questions and received valuable advice. I attended Drupal Camp Vancouver and became more confused than ever. The first session I attended was titled The Top Ten Modules in Drupal. Oh good, now I can find out which modules to put in my new basic website. But I was disappointed when the presenter focussed on the negative and talked about all the problems with these modules.

For my first Drupal project, I wanted to build a basic blog website with Drupal. Drupal comes with blog built in so I thought it would be easy. Turns out that the blog module that comes built in is for multi user sites and not the best for personal blogging. OK, what do I do now?

Then I learned about install profiles. I went to http://drupal.org/project/single_user_blog and downloaded Single-User Blog site profile. This is very easy to install and tells you the names of 4 modules to add basic functionality to your website. The whole process of installing modules was intimidating at first. But I read the readme.txt file and followed the instructions step by step and within a few hours, I had a personal blog site up and running and ready to roll.

Now that I've started learning new Drupal skill in bite size pieces and starting searching the Internet for the many resources available, things are starting to come together. See our Resources page.

For example, I went to Drupal.org looking for detailed instructions on how to upgrade to the newer version of Drupal. From 5.7 to 5.8. But I couldn't find them. Turns out after I downloaded the new version, I read the readme.txt and all the instructions were there.

I like to learn new web design skills by reading and working through "how-to" books. Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, and Community Websites is excellent for an introduction to What is Drupal and How to install and set up a simple site. Drupal 5 Themes covers the basics of theming. However, when I wanted to start building more advanced sites for clients, I couldn't find any books or online tutorials. There is a real lack of how to/recipe style instructions for building client specific websites. But Drupal Jumpstart by Lullabot is coming out in Fall 2008 which promises to address this problem nicely. Thanks, Lullabot. See Drupal Resources.