8 Resources for the Mighty Drupal Content Management System

by Sam Dean - Aug. 28, 2009Comments (5)

Undoubtedly, the open source project Drupal is one of the most robust content management systems (CMS) around. It provides the infrastructure and manages processes for many well-known web sites, including The Onion, Fast Company, InfoWorld and OStatic. We've had a great experience with it, and many large media companies are migrating to it and saving money. In our interview with Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal, he described the core contributors to the project as on the "same scale as the Linux kernel." There are also over 2,000 modules for Drupal, making it hugely extensible.

Since OStatic's inception, we've collected many good resources for both getting started with Drupal, and extending its functionality if you already use it. Here is our latest update to that collection--eight great resources, including interviews with Drupal insiders.

 

A Drupal Honcho. Angela Byron is one of Drupal's top evangelists, a Drupal community manager and core committer, and sits on Drupal's board. Check out our extensive interview with her, where she discussed long term goals for Drupal, how she became involved with it,  and much more.

 

 

Dude, Where's My Drupal? If you're just getting started with Drupal, DrupalDude.com is worth visiting for the many posts on specific tasks that you'll find there. You can get an excellent overview of the CMS from this post, where DrupalDude builds a website with Drupal in 10 minutes. Check out many more tutorial videos found at DrupalDude.com here.  

 

A Free Book Chapter. John K. VanDyk is author of one of the most respected books for Drupal power users: Pro Drupal Development. The book is an exhaustive guide to how to build powerful, customized web sites. Here is a link to the complete Table of Contents and also the first chapter of the book, (PDF), provided for OStatic by John.

Input from the Author. We also interviewed Drupal author John VanDyk here. He provides specific examples on how modules are built for Drupal, and describes what users can get out of his book.

 

 

 

Free Tips and More. If you're getting into Drupal, also get into Lullabot, which we wrote about here. A provider of training and consulting for Drupal, Lullabot has consulted with such companies as MTV, Sony BMG Records, Lifetime Television, IBM, and Fast Company in building and growing their Drupal sites. The best news is that they provide a lot of free, educational content about Drupal, including excellent podcasts. Here's one on Drupal tips and tricks. You can also get educational DVDs and more from Lullabot.

Help Me. Do you need support for a Drupal deployment? We've covered Acquia before, which offers a commercially supported version of Drupal and sells support subscriptions and other services.

 

Take in Acquia's Videos. Acquia has also recently added many tutorial videos on Drupal to its Community page, and the videos are free to watch here. You'll find videos such as "Build a Dynamic Community Site with Flash Using the Drupal Services Module," and videos on how to use Drupal's many modules. 

 

Is Drupal Right for Me? If you're planning a web site, whether it's a database-driven site, a blog, a combination of the two (which OStatic is), or something else, you may want to evaluate whether Drupal is right for you. Check out Kristin's post here for first steps. A good next step would be to to try OpenSourceCMS, which we wrote about here. It lets you function as an administrator of Drupal and other CMS offerings for hours, so you get a strong sense of all capabilities. Also, check out the many free tutorial videos on Drupal available here.

We hope you find some good insight into Drupal in this post. It's not an accident that we picked it to power OStatic. Few open source projects result in such a rich, incredibly extensible platform.

 


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Randy Clark uses OStatic to support Open Source, ask and answer questions and stay informed. What about you?



5 Comments
 

Ok, I am now really tired of having this site constantly promoting a certain CMS.


Why don't you make some effort to include Joomla to at least dignify your attempt of being neutral and professional, or are you telling us readers that it's Drupal and I don't want to hear anything else.


Because as you know its a mere choice and none of them (Joomla nor Drupal) are absolutely better than the other. As for me, I have chosen Joomla and find it to be a reliable system developing and becoming better for each day.


Thank you!


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@Gobezu, fair enough, we will post more on Joomla. Yes, Drupal is something we write about fairly regularly, because OStatic runs on it, and that helps us provide insight. We have covered Joomla and other CMS systems, though. For example, we've done posts on OpenSourceCMS, a site that lets you test drive Joomla (and Drupal, and other CMS systems). I like Joomla, and I know many people who run blogs and other types of sites on it.


Sam


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Thanks for listening, you will remain in my rss reader ;).

I truly appreciate your reporting in general.


Thanks again!


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Drupal is pretty amazing, though I have only used it for one project, but I find for smaller projects, wordpress to be faster and easier for the end user to adapt to.

Is this more or less agreed with by the majority? Also as far as seo the wordpress format seems a better option for small business. Am I wrong here or right? I profess to never have attempted any cms project on the level of this site.


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I don't see what the big deal is. Lots of people use Drupal and they appreciate help in getting the most out of their CMS.


0 Votes
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