learn drupal

The Pro Drupal Dev book is great. Halfway through having learned about modules, nodes, hooks, menu items, etc I was having trouble pulling together the big picture: how do all these make a site?

Took a step back and thought about a target site archetype: sections, pages, page types, page sections/modules. Mapping the site out this way, creating a page taxonomy (page types and their content components) I was better able to relate to the nodes I’ll need, modules, and even admin behavior and permissions (what should be enabled/disabled, and for whom).

This will help a lot as I go forward with the reading (will probably be revisiting a few chapters) and will probably be revisiting this (both the notes I took and the exercise itself) several times in the near future.

Really diggin’ how much of an App Framework Drupal is, and not just a CMS. Powerful stuff! Not to get ahead of myself but originally wondered what kind of integration it has with CakePHP. Now thinking that may be redundant. Still, I like Cake too. For eating and coding.

Just bought Pro Drupal Development by John K. VanDyk. This and a syllabus I just finished putting together for myself will help me organize the Drupal learning process for me. My goal is ultimately to develop mastery of a content management system in order to build websites with it for work (day job and personal).

I’ve worked with a few already in formal and informal settings, having this goal will help me put the pieces together so I can fully incorporate this into the tool belt. It’s great to be able to build sites for folks who need them but to give them something they can maintain for themselves (teach a person to fish) is the ultimate goal. This will take me several steps closer to that end, I’m hoping.