Bob's Spectacular Drupal Flying Circus

Submitted by Bob Snodgrass on Mon, 01/14/2008 - 21:54
in

At least that's how it was billed on the Meetup Site... spectacular?I think the emphasis was on the Flying Circus part of the description...Complete with view only sample of Monty Python's Holy Grail Ale from Black Sheep Brewing Co. It's hard to characterize Drupal as the Holy Grail of web application frameworks, but I think we demonstrated that it can certainly hold it's own as one of the world's top content management systems (CMS). The quality of the Drupal Community and potential for the future makes it the best choice for anyone looking for a CMS. All in all, I think we all had a good time and I hope everyone at least learned something. Introductions - the knights of the round table in counter-clockwise order were Eric Michalsen, Bruce Malesh, Steve Breese, John Mahady, Chris C., Dan, Tom Rogers, Walter Bamert, and Bob Snodgrass.The agenda for the evening was as follows and we stuck pretty well to that. Our objective (you always need one of those) was to produce and roll out our website for the Fox Valley Computing Professionals Meetup group. (if you are looking at this post, you're using it right now). I focused on the Drupal user experience from an administrators point of view.

  • Drupal Overview
  • Installation
  • Basic Configuration
  • Other Stuff
  • Playtime?

Here are some notes:What Drupal is not... – the Holy Grail. What Drupal is... a Cross between a Content Management System (CMS) and an Application Framework, with lots of great modules available.What's it good for?

  • undefined or moving target installations
  • projects short on budget, long on possibilities
  • non-coders with some technical ability
  • sites with content generated/maintained by users

Our First Step - Planning, and determining, What do we want it to do?

  • member list
  • create content
  • favorite links
  • categorize and find content
  • groups
  • integrate with external sites like flicker
  • Other?

Some Pre-Installation Resources:

The Basic Installation Process (more at http://drupal.org/getting-started/5/install):

  • Setup your domain or subdomain
  • Copy files: Core and Additional Modules and Themes
  • Create Database (record your database name, user, and password you will need it in the next step)
  • Goto your domain or subdomain - to setup your database connection and create your site database and take you to a Welcome page that steps you through the configuration.

At this point we dove into creating our site and as a result we had our original Fox Valley Computing Professionals set up in the process.  On the fly... in less than 2 hours.We also showed some Drupal Example Sites to give people a feel for how flexible Drupal can be:

No votes yet

Comments

Bob's Flying Circus

Submitted by trogers on Thu, 01/24/2008 - 06:57.

Thanks for the great introduction to Drupal. I started playing around with it and eventually setup a new Intranet portal for my department at the hospital. It's LDAP authenticated and eveyone loves the new interface. I'm still getting used to it and I'm still trying out lots of different ideas for this site but I was told yesterday to go ahead and launch.

Good to hear you are making progress

Submitted by Bob Snodgrass on Sat, 01/26/2008 - 18:21.

I think it's a perfect tool for lots of interdepartmental sites. Glad to hear you are making progress. Exactly the kind of result I was looking for, that people could get enough of an introduction to dive in and make something new happen!

Let me know if I can be of any help or can put you in touch with some more resources.

Bob Snodgrass

Bob Snodgrass