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Re: [school-discuss] SchoolForge site is up with new features!

Probably the most challenging part initially is wanting to have full control over how the content is being generated but not having any idea where to go and what to change.  When I was just getting started, the first couple installations felt like walking down a dark hallway, blindfolded - just feeling my way through.  Because I wasn't familiar with the Drupal terminology (node, content types, overriding functions etc), I wasn't able to search on the right phrases to find what I was looking for, and even if I did find it, there were parts that I didn't quite get.

The first time that I started to feel comfortable was after I wrote a couple customized SQL queries to pull some information out. The next trick is figuring out which modules you need to get the functionality your looking for - there are combinations of modules that do some really great things. I generally use pathauto, cck, and xml sitemap. CCK (content costruction kit) is really cool, you can create a 'content type' and import a database and tell it where to put the specific bits. 

The last part that I recently picked up on was how to override functions - so basically with this you can find where Drupal does something within the drupal codebase, a php function somewhere, and instead of changing the Drupal code you rewrite the changed code into a specific file.  Much better then just hacking into the code and changing things around.

That's sort of a general idea of the challenges I've had - it's not hard to learn at all, once you get through that initial learning phase and have the terminology. Once you get that, and an handle on the templates and some familiarity with the database schema - it becomes very easy to utilize the huge amount of information on the Drupal website.

Good luck with the site. Drupal is worth the time it takes to learn, and there are jobs out there for Drupal devs - not a bad deal. 

"How hard has it been to  learn drupal?  I want to
start it.
thank  you
Teprine"


Thanks Daniel, this should be fixed now.

Daniel Griswold wrote: 
Looks great....but,I am unable to see the Captcha Image in the account creation page.

Firefox 2.0.0.2 on SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10