General discussion

I know that a lot of peaople will get angry on reading this posting but I hope the drupal developers can use my feedback for further improvements.
Just to let you know before that I am a application software developer for Windows and I have nearly no experience with web development.

A few years ago I found an article about MAMBO and I thought it could be interesting to try it out.
I found a hint that there is a project called XAMPP which is the web server plattform for Micrsoft Windows. It was so easy to install and after just answering a few messageboxes I had a running web server with mySQL installed, configured and running. That was so impressing to me because I know how hard it is to make end user friendly setups like this.
The next step was the installation of MAMBO and it was the same way no problem. Just let it run and configuring itself. After less than 1 minute I had a fully working content management system.

I really was thinking of getting a web developer after seeing this... ;-)

Now, some years later I have the need for an own web page and I googled around for the best CMS currently available and I found out that it was DRUPAL. I just read a lot and became a friend of it before ever trying it.

Then I fetched again a setup package of XAMPP (which is now even more faster and easier to install!!!) and tried the setup of DRUPAL.

But: I was really disappointed because there is no automatic setup...!? I had to follow the INSTALL.TXT and it was very hard for me to get things work. After many hours (!) I managed to get the startup page of DRUPAL and entered a new user/password. The system told me that there was an error on sending mail which I can understand because this was just a test on my home PC without mail server. So what now? It will take further steps to install and manage a mail server on my PC and I start losing interest in DRUPAL. I think of getting back MAMBO...

I promise that this is the last idiotic question I will ask since I am going to try this out after this question!

Is the editing environment idiot-proved? What I mean is that when a non-developer (e.g. a receptionist or someone with no knowledge of websites etc.) log on to make changes, will he/she be able to just upload some text, or an images etc. without having to know anything at all about html, css, and so on? And will areas of the site be protected from them?

I am thinking of comparing the editing environment to something like Macromedia Contribute.

I recieved these two error messages in administration index :
first :
Duplicate entry 'menu:6:en' for key 1 query: INSERT INTO cache (cid, data, created, expire, headers) VALUES ('menu:6:en', 'a:3:{s:10:\"path index\";a:163:{s:16:\"admin/aggregator\";s:1:\"2\";s:26:\"admin/aggregator/edit/feed\";i:-2;s:30:\
"admin/aggregator/edit/category\";i:-3;s:23:\"admin/aggregator/remove\";i:-4;s:23:\"admin/aggregator/update\";i:-5;s:21:\
"admin/aggregator/list\";i:-6;s:25:\"admin/aggregator/add/feed\";i:-7;s:29:\"admin/aggregator/add/category\";i:-8;s:10:\

i go through the source and found code as such

$result = pager_query("SELECT * FROM {users} WHERE LOWER(name) LIKE LOWER('%%%s%%')", 15, 0, NULL, $keys);

in the above code, %%%s%% is what? can someone explain, thanks.

Can Drupal produce sites that can be displayed on different types of media? For example, PDAs or cell phones?

If so, do I need to develop more than one *site*, perhaps using different themes?

Petre

Hi,

I am a computer literate, more "front-end" oriented designer/developer. And, I need to get better at drupal.