I asked this on the Drupal mailing list but I'll also ask it here.
Hi,
I'm going to migrate my blog from 4.6 to the newly released 4.7 and I'm thinking of documenting all the stuff I'll be doing to turn it into a tutorial on blogging with Drupal a little more advanced than the one in the handbook. I'd like to touch topics such as Last.fm integration, social bookmarks (from Simpy via my module), tags, tagcloud, blogroll etc.
My question is whether you guys feel there's a need for such a tutorial and also what do you think it would be good to add in it.Thanks,
Alexandru Badiu
http://andu.417.ro
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Comments
I'd say there's definitely a need. Now, I've never received formal education in OO programming and yet somehow I'm normally able to attain some basic profiency in CMS or other scripted systems. But Drupal is an amazing mess. I've grappled with it, ask questions, talked to other human beings in the flesh (most of whom also admitted to inordinate amounts of time wasted on Drupal wrestling). Eventually I gave up on it.
Granted, I guess if you "can't do it" then you must not be the intended audience for Drupal. I always thought the main problem was not anything inherent in the system (even taking into account existing spaghetti code issues), but rather the largest barrier was piss poor documentation and inaccurate tutorials. I might have used Drupal otherwise, but eventually realized I was spending entirely too much time trying to get the leash on it instead of actually doing someting productive. So, I dumped it.
I had the same problem at the beginning. Nodes? Custom nodes? Taxonomy? I actually gave up at one point on it but work has made me dwelve into Drupal again. I'm quite happy I had to do so, because after the first period of searching, learning, asking, I became quite proeficient with it. But yes, the learning curve is pretty long compaired to other CMS's I used.
About the code: I think Drupal's code is pretty ok. And the module dev system is pretty easy to understand and improve upon. But that's because I've seen a couple of other CMS' which made my code look professional compaired to them (and of course, I'm no professional programmer).
Sean, maybe my tutorial will make you switch to Drupal. :)
Hmmm.. I think the issue of taxonomy took me a good 3 days before I *full* got the impact of what it meant. Nodes was not a problem. But getting things to work together? Bah! Configuring it and creating new skins and such? Ugh! Somehow it reminds of Joomla and all these other ecosystems which require a full religious conversion before one can see the light. I firmly believe the project leads should be replaced by folks who understand the concept of userfriendliness. But, when it's "free," it's hard to complain.
I look forward to seeing your tutorial when it's available.
I'm just getting into Drupal and I think I'm just scratching the surface because I have no idea what taxonomy is actually supposed to do. Lots of descriptions of what it is but very few on what it's for. So I'll bookmark this thread and see if anything materializes.
thanks,
kyle
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