the joshmiller minute

Just found an awesome 6-page reference sheet that does an excellent job of getting the average developer started on Drupal. I've not seen this promoted elsewhere, so thought I'd share:

http://refcardz.dzone.com/refcardz/getting-started-drupal

About the Author

Matt Vance is a Web developer, technology consultant, and freelance writer living in Austin, Texas. He has written for Macworld magazine and Lifehacker.com. He can be contacted through his website, http://minezone.org/

Update

To download requires DZone registration. Though, you can also check out http://www.scribd.com/doc/16597017/DZone-Refcardz-59-Getting-Started-with-Drupal and view it fullscreen and print it.

An excerpt (and fun announcement about drupalcon) from my wife's shiny new blog...

"We have stumbled upon an exciting opportunity.  Josh loves Drupal.  We went to Washington D.C. so he could meet other Drupalers that speak his nerd language.  He liked it so much that he thought...Paris....why not?  So he filled out information for a scholarship and he won!"

Read More... (and please comment on her blog as she is new to this and I want to make sure she likes our fellow drupalers)

At Haan Marketing+Communications, we are quickly converting a successful, but small, advertising shop into a new media online marketing company. This has been going so well for us, we are outgrowing our current workforce. There are so many website jobs stacked up, we don't know how to get them all done! We need to add another Drupal developer / interface designer / jquery programmer / everything'er to the mix. Could this be your shot to do Drupal sites full time?

The job posting: http://haanmc.com/careers/index.php?cid=9 (This whole site is based on that custom CMS I wrote before I knew about Drupal, so please don't judge us too harshly)

You can ask any questions via Twitter and I will respond: twitter.com/xcv

In these tough economic times, it is always good to know that our skills are still in high demand.

Part of the process that I go through when starting on a new website, is spelling out the content types. During this process I look at a proposed (hopefully approved) sitemap and start listing those things that are fundamentally different. For instance, a news item is much different than, say, a simple "relatively" static page (like About Us). So right away, we have a "page" content type and some other unique and well thought-out types of content.

Along the way it's easy to fall prey to an alluring potential time-saver: Skipping the "secondary" Content Types. It makes logical sense: the less times you have to create a content type, the less times you have to add fields, create views, and eventually link it all together with blocks and some awesome drupal module sauce. At least, in theory, it seems to save you time to skip those pesky "little" content types.

[Bad practices alert] I'm about to digress into a fictional account that should you change some of the content types would be completely true... [/Bad practices alert]

Let's say you have a news section on your new website that has to list an event or two within the post. The CCK and the contributed date module should make this an obvious answer: give your news content type a date field. But wait, each event could have an image and perhaps a description. Well, shoot. Maybe events would be better off as it's own content type. Oh, whatever, we can add in some CCK Text fields and run some contemplate magic so that we can relate the order of both the text fields and the event fields. Finish it all off with some CCK filefield magic through an imagecache view and you're all set! Wait, step back a moment.

Yeah, that's right -- we just created an "event" content type within the news content type. If it takes a lot of "code glue" to make your node display correctly, chances are you would be better off with a secondary content type and some CCK nodereferences.

The moral of my rambling story? Don't skip over the content types. It will come back to bite you. If you have unique content that somehow demands that two (or more) cck fields be linked in a weird way (something like a young frankenstein), chances are you have been combining two or more content types. This leads to frustration and formatting nightmares. Until the flexibility of flexifield becomes more commonplace, for every content there should be a content type.

Straight out of core, Drupal will support multiple websites with different databases all from the same drupal installation. The only configuration needed is naming folders within your sites folder. For more information, you can read about best practices for tweaking the site folder structure.

So, once you have setup the right folders, every site will actually load the SAME index.php. This took me awhile to understand believe. The Drupal system then loads the appropriate sites folder. That's why there is an "all" folder (every site gets these modules and themes) and a "default" folder (if your site is not listed, use this files folder and database settings).

That's pretty darn handy when you need 5 completely different sites that have little relation to each other (like the poster-child of multi-site success stories: One Drupal website for each artist at Sony BMG Records). But what about when you have five inter-related branded websites that need to share things like events, databases, even modules? You could get fancy with a lot of hacking between the "all" folder and specific folders, or you could use the "Domain" module. It gives you domain level configuration options, like setting a different "home" page and choosing that each domain have a different views table. As of today, they have released a version 6 release candidate (might as well call it version 2.0 stable, folks).

http://drupal.org/project/domain

I even found a case study where ISL Consulting helped a wine company setup three or four websites that shared events and ecommerce capabilities using the domain module. http://drupal.org/node/369398

Now all I need to decide is if our client needs 5 independent websites or 1 multisite that shares a lot of things... hmm...