Drupal 7

A Beginner's Tutorial

Ravi Yelluripatiryelluripati@gmail.comin.linkedin.com/in/raviyelluripati

https://drupal.org

27 Sep 2013

Assumptions

A working knowledge of PHP

Working knowledge of Ubuntu

Knowledge of setting up of LAMP

Basic knowledge of HTML5,CSS3, jQuery and javascript

Installation

System requirementsWeb Server: Apache, Nginx or MS- IIS

Database: mysql, postgre, sqlite

PHP 5.3.x

Step 1: Download and extract Drupal

Step 2: Create the database

Step 3: Create the settings.php file

Step 4: Run the installation script

Step 5: Set up cron and Step 6: Configure clean URLs Ref: https://drupal.org/documentation/install

Best place to learn Drupal

Web: http://www.drupal.org

Book: Pro Drupal 7 Development by Todd Tomlinson

What is a Website?

In short a website is electronic content which can be viewed, interacted and transacted with, over the web

In general, a website possesses a footer area with logo and facility to login, a menu bar, a highlight (alert) area, easy access links usually on the left and right side of the pages, main content area in the center, a footer at a minimum

The content area is where most of the content is shown

How to Build a Website?

In the context of present tutorial, we need to write some HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery (called as client side programming) based scripts to view the desired output

We also need to do some PHP scripting (called the server side programming) which supports and delivers client side code (dynamic web pages) besides managing the data in the database

What is Drupal going to do for us?

As you may have rightly guessed Drupal manages our content its a content management system

Using Drupal CMS makes it very easy to develop highly complex websites

Drupal is built using PHP; functionality can be extended using PHP

Drupal user community has built thousands of useful web 'objects', if we may say, called as modules which greatly complement our web development effort

Drupal 7 more info

Drupal is highly modular

Drupal has 23,787 Modules, 1840 Themes and 687 Distributions with 29,173 developers working on it!

Drupal uses Javascript extensively. In fact, Drupal is set as a javascript object which has four properties: settings, behaviors, themes and locale (Ref: https://drupal.org/node/304258)

Drupal 7 more info

The following Guides are available on Drupal website to get startedUnderstanding Drupal

Installation Guide

Administration and Security Guide

Structure Guide

Site Building Guide

Multilingual Guide

Theming Guide

Mobile Guide... and more

Drupal 7 Understanding the Admin Layout

Lets see a live page to understand better ...

Drupal 7 The Hello World!

Hands On ...