By brandondrury on

I know that when I get through his near-death experience known as getting through the learning curve of Drupal, I'm going to write me up some Drupal Quickstart guides. Has anyone already done this?

Yes, Drupal can do almost anything you'd ever want a website to do. And that's why it's such a pain to learn at first. If there were either custom preset downloads of Drupal with specific applications in mind, or at least specific instructions to help you set up what you need, I think support would be reduced tremendously and usage of the software would grow exponentially.

This program is hardcore. In some ways too hardcore. In fact, I've spent the last 14 hours trying to get a simple way to quickly and easily add images to nodes and setting up a simple category system with basic navigation. This is stuff that should be overly obvious. While there may be cases where site images and site navigation aren't needed, I'd guess this represents an extremely small percentage of users.

I'm fairly up on the websites design and such, but I must admit that I feel like I'm back in college again learning some of this crap. For example, I don't care about the "science of classification". I do understand that some articles could/should fit in multiple categories, but I just don't understand why I'm learning a new science when all I really want to do is build up an extremely informative website. Just give me enough functionality to hold me over.

So when a person just wants to create, a movie review site, why do we bother explaining concepts that take 40 hours before they even set in? Why don't we just say.....

"Look. This program will do damn near anything under the sun. But in the interest of giving you what you want in an efficient amount of time, we have simplified the setup. This particular download/guide will show you how to setup a movie review site in about 10 minutes. If you are not sure why you are doing something we instruct, don't worry about it. Just do it. When your site is filled with visitors and you are making a few bucks, you can then "come back to school" and learn how this thing really works. "

In fact, one of Drupals strongest traits is it's ability to adapt. You can change anything you want, I think. So when our guy's movie review site is killing, he can always add more advanced features.

Maybe the movie review site is not the best example, but I'd bet there are 10 basic site ideas that could cover most applications.

Right now I'm trying to get Drupal to work on a website the reviews guitar equipment, provides articles and news on everything pertaining to guitar. I need static pages as well as dynamic pages. I need to understand the real world functionality of the software. Theory and philosophy is not important. The science of classification will be a good thing to read up on in 30 days, but right now I want to know how to get my category information in blocks to show up on every page of the site. I want to know how to setup a site with fixed content at the top that lists the most recent articles at the bottom.

If I'm a total idiot and I missed something in the Handbook, please let me know. It just seams that it would be more efficient to be explained this stuff than reading a handbook that is overly comprehensive to the point that it's inefficient to read it sometimes.

So are there any quickstart guides with specific instructions for getting this thing to function for a beginner?

Brandon