Drupal for Content Creators

Rasheed BarnesTom Deryckere

About NorthPoint

http://www.northps.comhttp://twitter.com/NPS_Drupal

You

• Name?

• Years/days/hours of Drupal experience?

• What do you (plan to) do with Drupal?

• Expectation on the session?

We take questions!

Drupal is a CMSand more ...

What is Drupal?Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual, a community of users, or an enterprise to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website

The built-in functionality, combined with thousands of freely available add-on modules.

Drupal is open-source software distributed under the GPL ("GNU General Public License") and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers

What do people build• Blogs

• Shops

• Publishers

• Media sites

• Government

• Company websites

• Content Portals

• Corporate sites

• Confererence sites

• Intranets

• Social network sites

• ...

Examples

http://www.whitehouse.gov Government

http://www.theonion.com News

http://www.drupalcoder.com Bloggers

http://www.mobiledrupal.com Bloggers

http://www.amnesty.org/ Non Profit

http://www.musescore.orgSoftware

http://eatthis.menshealth.com Media

http://www.womenshealth.comLifestyle

http://www.jenniferlopez.com/Artists

http://media.mit.edu/Education

...

Why Drupal

• Open Source

• Stable, secure and Flexible platform

• Enormous active community

• thousands contributed features

• ...

Why Not Drupal

• Can be hard to learn

• Takes some time

Who does Drupal?

3 type of drupalers

• The programmer

• The site builder

• The content creator

Content creator

• No interfacing with the code

• Focussed on getting the message (‘content’) out to the world

• Configures Drupal to it needs

• Must work within the boundaries provided by Drupal and its modules

6 or 7

Drupal 6 or 7

• Drupal 7 will be released soon (expected end of august)

• Huge usability improvements for content creators

START

Contents

• Start with fresh Drupal install

• Go through main configuration pages

• Cover basic terminology

• Rasheed takes the challenge:“You name it, Rasheed builds it”

• (not about installing Drupal)

Step 1: structure

• Add some content

• Create homepage

• Simple menu structure

Content in Drupal

• Content in Drupal is called a ‘node’

• Different ‘node’ types exist out of the box, and new node types can be created.

• e.g.:

• A blog post is a node of the type blog

• A simple page is a node of the type page

• ...

The Node

• A node contains ‘fields’ that can be filled with content

• Title

• Body

• published date (automatic)

• publishing state (automatic)

• Drupal allow modules and site builders to add fields to a node type (see the CCK module)

Nodes

Menu

• Drupal has an ‘easy’ to use menu system

• ‘out-of-the-box’

• Navigation block

• Primary links

• Secondary links

• Assign pages to menus when you create content

Look and Feel

• Drupal comes with several themes

• Many themes are available online

• Themes consist of ‘regions’

• ex: header, left, right, content, footer

Blocks

• Blocks are important elements on Drupal site that can be placed in several ‘regions’

• Blocks do not contain the main content, but enriching information or functionality.

Modules

• Drupal functionality can be augmented by using several modules.

• Important ones that come with drupal but are not enabled by default:

• Blog, contact, path, search

Blog

• Gives you a simple content type that enables you to list all blog posts

• RSS feed of your blog

Comments

• Commenting on all nodes

Path Alias

• node/id is not SEO friendly and doesn’t look good

Taxonomy

• Taxonomy = creating categories

• e.g.: Blog tags, categories for

• Predefined categories versus real time tagging (‘folksonomy’)

Search

• Enables searching content on your Drupal site

http://drupal.org/project/Modules

Thank you!

NorthPoint looks for Drupal experts

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ContactNorthpoint

infoUS@northps.com

www.northps.comNew York Office

130 West 42nd Street

New York, NY 10036

Tel: 212-819-1700

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