An introduction to Drupal

As part of my research in the hopes of winning a position I applied for as a web developer in the city I am researching the companies two most used technologies Doctrine and Drupal. I've been developing web applications now for around 4 years and I've heard a lot about Drupal but I've never got around to testing it out. WordPress is the main platform I use at Mandurah Web with a few Joomla sites cropping up here and there. I like WordPress and find creating custom themes a piece of cake while implementing custom functionality is also easy once you've got your head around the hooks and filters. I know WordPress is a blogging platform and Drupal is a CMS but nevertheless I expect so see some similarities.

Download and Install Drupal

I headed over to drupal.org and download the latest version (Drupal 7), extracted it to my local web server and had it installed within two minutes. My first impression as a user was fantastic. I loved how easy the default theme made it to edit and create content. Creating pages and articles, hiding pages from anonymous users, positioning menu items, moving modules around and many other theme customisations all just seemed too easy.

Editing the default theme

My intentions are to create a theme from scratch but with limited time and my eagerness to see something in action I started by taking a copy of the default theme into my sites directory. A simple find and replace for the default theme name with my new theme name in templates.php and I was up and running. After making a few changes here and there and installing a few modules I decided that the documentation was a good place to head. I'm going to leave this post here as I'm half way through reading http://drupal.org/theme-guide/6-7. I will be back sometime after Christmas with some tips, problems I encountered and my overall thoughts on creating custom themes for Drupal 7. Merry Christmas to all.