The document provides an overview of Drupal for content creators. It discusses what Drupal is and how it can be used to build various types of websites. It covers basic Drupal terminology like nodes, menus, blocks, modules, and taxonomy. It also provides examples of setting up a simple homepage and menu structure for a new Drupal site.

1. Drupal for Content
Creators
Rasheed Barnes
Tom Deryckere

2. About NorthPoint
http://www.northps.com
http://twitter.com/NPS_Drupal

3. You
• Name?
• Years/days/hours of Drupal experience?
• What do you (plan to) do with Drupal?
• Expectation on the session?

4. We take questions!

5. Drupal is a CMS
and more ...

6. What is Drupal?
Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual, a
community of users, or an enterprise to easily publish, manage
and organize a wide variety of content on a website
The built-in functionality, combined with thousands of freely
available add-on modules.
Drupal is open-source software distributed under the GPL
("GNU General Public License") and is maintained and
developed by a community of thousands of users and
developers

7. What do people build
• Blogs • Content Portals
• Shops • Corporate sites
• Publishers • Confererence sites
• Media sites • Intranets
• Government • Social network sites
• Company websites • ...

8. Examples

9. http://www.whitehouse.gov Government

10. News
http://www.theonion.com

11. http://www.drupalcoder.com Bloggers

12. http://www.mobiledrupal.com Bloggers

13. http://www.amnesty.org/ Non Profit

14. Software
http://www.musescore.org

15. http://eatthis.menshealth.com Media

16. Lifestyle
http://www.womenshealth.com

17. Artists
http://www.jenniferlopez.com/

18. Education
http://media.mit.edu/

19. ...

20. Why Drupal
• Open Source
• Stable, secure and
Flexible platform
• Enormous active community
• thousands contributed features
• ...

21. Why Not Drupal
• Can be hard to learn
• Takes some time

22. Who does Drupal?

23. 3 type of drupalers
• The programmer
• The site builder
• The content creator

24. Content creator
• No interfacing with the code
• Focussed on getting the message (‘content’)
out to the world
• Configures Drupal to it needs
• Must work within the boundaries provided
by Drupal and its modules

25. 6 or 7

26. Drupal 6 or 7
• Drupal 7 will be released soon (expected
end of august)
• Huge usability improvements for content
creators

27. START

28. Contents
• Start with fresh Drupal install
• Go through main configuration pages
• Cover basic terminology
• Rasheed takes the challenge:
“You name it, Rasheed builds it”
• (not about installing Drupal)

29. Step 1: structure
• Add some content
• Create homepage
• Simple menu structure

30. Content in Drupal
• Content in Drupal is called a ‘node’
• Different ‘node’ types exist out of the box,
and new node types can be created.
• e.g.:
• A blog post is a node of the type blog
• A simple page is a node of the type page
• ...

31. The Node
• A node contains ‘fields’ that can be filled
with content
• Title
• Body
• published date (automatic)
• publishing state (automatic)
• Drupal allow modules and site builders to
add fields to a node type (see the CCK
module)

32. Nodes

33. Menu
• Drupal has an ‘easy’ to use menu system
• ‘out-of-the-box’
• Navigation block
• Primary links
• Secondary links
• Assign pages to menus when you create
content

34. Look and Feel
• Drupal comes with several themes
• Many themes are available online
• Themes consist of ‘regions’
• ex: header, left, right, content, footer

35. Blocks
• Blocks are important elements on Drupal
site that can be placed in several ‘regions’
• Blocks do not contain the main content,
but enriching information or functionality.

37. Modules
• Drupal functionality can be augmented by
using several modules.
• Important ones that come with drupal but
are not enabled by default:
• Blog, contact, path, search

38. Blog
• Gives you a simple content type that
enables you to list all blog posts
• RSS feed of your blog

39. Comments
• Commenting on all nodes

40. Path Alias
• node/id is not SEO friendly and doesn’t
look good

41. Taxonomy
• Taxonomy = creating categories
• e.g.: Blog tags, categories for
• Predefined categories versus real time
tagging (‘folksonomy’)

42. Search
• Enables searching content on your Drupal
site

43. http://drupal.org/project/Modules

44. Thank you!

45. NorthPoint looks for
Drupal experts
/**
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46. Contact
Northpoint
infoUS@northps.com
www.northps.com
New York Office
130 West 42nd Street
New York, NY 10036
Tel: 212-819-1700
@twom
@nps_drupal