Carl Wiedemann did a basic session on basic Drupal usage as a live demo. These are my notes from the presentation, such as they are. He had a drupal instance set up where he:

We'll explain how high-level user needs translate into Drupal concepts. We'll start building a simple Drupal site with common features such as news, events calendar, downloads, and contact forms.

Carl started discussing elementary site building focusing on initial planning on paper. He pointed out that there are 2361 contributed modules for Drupal 6, but most sites can be built with 20 or so. Working in Drupal is suffering in "Trial by Error" so you should really look at the well documented more heavily used modules.

Part I Some remarks on planning

Many folks Design and then think about the functional needs and finally think about the content. This is a mistake. One should start by looking at content then function and how design will fit with your site's needs.

We should start at looking at Purpose + Audience + Actions What is the site trying to accomplish? Create a series of actions for the site.

Start with Paper Prototyping.

Put together a Purpose, an Audience, and Actions. Then create a simple site map. Wireframe up the home page.

First Steps

• Load up Drupal
• Load up Admin Menu
• Config

Roles tell us what permissions (what can a person do on the site,)

Create an Admin Role - Using UID1 for working a site is a bad idea.

If something seems broken, permissions are often the problem that something is "broken" like not being able to comment.

Use multiple browsers to see what people from different roles on the site. This is good for troubleshooting and testing.

Content Types and Nodes

• A node is a reference to a piece of content
• Content Types are a class of nodes
• A good analogy is a symphony orchestra - a section is a content type and the instruments are nodes

In a default Drupal installation, Page and Story are the default content types.

Going to node/add/page, Carl created a Services Page and Home Page. Pathauto created aliases for the pages. To have the Home Page show up as the default landing page, you need to Go to site configuration and site-information and add the node number near the bottom of the page.

You can use CCK to define new content types. This allows you to add fields to your content types. Views allows you to create lists of nodes

Carl went through the basics of setting up views for the different content types he had defined previously, creating lists for events and for blog posts.

Carl did a good job of explaining the basics of setting up a site.