Beginner

There's a mistake I've made which a few others have made too. The mistake is rushing into your new Drupal site and populating your menu right away.

While trying to think of what to write, regarding Drupal taxonomy, it was my kids’ story
last night that inspired this posting about this video covering how the taxonomy module works and what it means to your Drupal site.

Drupal 7 is bound to be one of the most anticipated releases in all of Drupal's history. Not simply because it's the next release, but rather it's "new lease on life" with regards to usability, interface and interaction.

Drupal has long had this "stigma" about it regarding its learning curve. This stigma, however, is there for good reason. Drupal is, for anyone brand new to Drupal, hard to learn because it doesn't attempt to be all things to all people. It's the starter kit to your Lego collection or the concrete foundation to your digital house.

SEO is one of the more critical aspects for any web site - at least if you want to be found in the search engines. The fact that Drupal is capable of being super SEO friendly is a great benefit. However, it doesn't do you much good to simply know that Drupal is SEO friendly. With modules like SEO Checklist from Volacci you can certainly walk through the myriad of possible SEO options.

Yep, we're living in a media rich world (just in case you didn't notice the video on this web page <wink>). In fact, what's the second most popular search engine? Is it Bing? Nope, it's YouTube of all things (last I heard).

So, all you really need to know, is how to bring your Drupal site up to the media rich standards of the new web and activate some media modules. Personally, I've used a number of them, and I'm quite comfortable digging around with Javascript and jQuery, however, there's something to be said for the easy route.

The Drupal Webform module is both a popular and useful module for collecting information from web site visitors.

For the most part, you can install, activate and start to create your own webforms right away. The module is pretty easy to use, well crafted and created by one of my most favorite Drupal developers.

Using webform is great when collecting valuable information, but what happens when you need a bit more. Is it possible to know where a site visitor was when they clicked on a response form? Can you determine what browser they are using, and if they use Macintosh or Windows? You sure can, and it's VERY helpful! Take a few minutes to watch this video and start collecting even more useful information.

Like many other content management systems, Drupal is built on PHP. With PHP, you can dig in and make it do whatever you want. Likewise, you can dig into Drupal and make it do most everything you want - well, almost. If you're not afraid of writing PHP code, then the sky's the limit. If you're limited by the time and desire to learn PHP, then Panels is likely the way to go!

I recently received a direct tweet from the folks at Development Seed with notice about the beta release of Open Atrium. Having been quite interested in seeing what they've got, I quickly downloaded a copy and got it up and running.

I decided to record the process and provide my first impressions. Bear in mind, these are first impressions and I'm not an expert (by any means) about their system. I dug into the system as a developer and skimmed through it.

If you're interested in finding out more about the actual feature set, they've got a video on this page.

Feel free to leave related comments below.

Maybe your experience was similar. You learned about Drupal, you thought it was great (still is) and you wanted to make it do more.

Of course, you knew about adding modules. There's a whole section on Drupal.org. You visit the site and WOW! Get ready to surf through over 4,000 modules. You'd have to spend enough time with at least 10-a-day to know what each one does.

Discovering if a) there's a module that does what you want, and b) if its name may transalte into the feature you seek (try to guess what Eldorado Superfly does without reading the description), can be an exercise in exploratory determination - determined to keep exploring that is.

Whether you're an avid blogger or you simply make the occasional post, there's just something uncomfortable about editing long posts and working with pictures when you're in a web browser. If you've heard of Ecto (mac), MarsEdit (mac), ScribeFire (firefox) or any of the other popular desktop blogging clients, then chances are you'll want to use one of those tools to access and edit your Drupal blog.

Here's where the gotcha shows up. Getting things set up right!

While I love what Drupal can do, it's lacking in the area of "Where's my 'use blogging software' checkbox?". I came across this issue the other day when messing around on my personal domain. I wanted to setup Blog API and get started making some posts. On top of that, I wanted the easiest way possible to get multiple pictures into a post. Using a blogging client is the best way (read easiest) to do that - as far as I know.