Introduction to Drupal Andrew Rudy Outline What is Drupal Why - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Introduction to Drupal

Andrew Rudy

Outline

• What is Drupal
• Why use Drupal (Pros and Cons)
• Examples of what Drupal can do
• How to download and install Drupal
• How to use Drupal’s user interface

What is Drupal?

• Drupal is a free tool used to build web sites.
• Content management framework
• Similar to Wordpress
• Hybrid between a web application framework

and a Content Management System

• Cross-platform, PHP, and highly modular

What is Drupal?

• Drupal allows you to change your website from

a point and click interface. – Add content/articles – Create sidebars and menus – Add or change the theme (look and feel) – Add, edit, or remove people – Add, edit, or remove roles – Extend your sites functionality with modules

Why use Drupal?

• Out of the box functionality and flexibility

– No need to reinvent the wheel – Much more functionality than Wordpress

• Large Community

– 900,000+ users, Drupal forums, DrupalCon

• Drupal Modules

– Many free prebuilt modules readily available – Ex. Captcha, Auto log out, Calendar, and many many others

Pros

• Large learning curve

– Much more than Wordpress, Joomla

• Slower due to amount of resources
• Drupal developers are scarce
• Minor updates can be difficult

Why use Drupal?

Cons

What can Drupal do?

• It is used as a back-end for 2.1% of all

the websites worldwide

• Example Drupal sites

Design + User Experience + Functionality

Drupal Core

• The standard Drupal download comes with just

the most common functions as seen above

• To add things like forms, emailing, groups and

more specific things, a module will need to be added

The 5-minute Install

• Download https://drupal.org/download Unzip
• Create Database - myNewSiteName
• Duplicate sites/default.settings.php
• Rename to settings.php - Set permissions

everyone read/write

• Create folder: sites/default/files - Set permissions

everyone read/write

• View site: http://localhost/myNewSiteName
• Done!

Modules

• Functionality is included in

modules, which can be enabled or disabled after install

• The functionality of modules

are almost endless, from a Drupal command line (Drush) to an e-commerce payment form

Conclusion

• Drupal is tool used to build functional

websites with content management systems

• Drupal has more of a learning curve, but

can provide a lot of functionality

End

• Slideshare.net/ucdrupal