To learn Drupal I've been going through the Drupal.org website and reading "Pro Drupal Development" by VanDyk and Westgate. PDD suggested that if you are a Drupal Developer you should install the Devel module.

The Devel Module is found at http://drupal.org/project/devel, and I downloaded 5.x-1.x-dev. There was also a release for Drupal 6, but I'm still on 5. I unzipped this directory, and uploaded it to my website in sites/all/modules/devel. Then in 'Home >> Administer >> Site building >> Modules' I enabled all 4 options - Devel, Generator, Devel Node Access, and Macro.

As Drupal is designed to be a fantastic platform for community based websites it stands to reason that one of the first things a Drupal developer will need to develop is a form. Here then is a very simple Hello World with a form. This just asks the user to select from one of 3 greetings with a radio button, and echos the greeting back to them. No fancy DB calls, just a little form with a teensy bit of processing.

I went into Home >> User Account -> Edit, and noticed that I could Upload a picture of myself. The only difficulty was "Maximum dimensions are 85x85 and the maximum size is 200 kB."

So, I went into Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0. I opened the photo I wanted to use. As the photo had to be pretty small to upload I started by using the crop tool to select a smaller area of the photo. Once I selected an area I used edit>>cut, and then file>>new from clipboard. With that new image I went into file>>save for web, set the height to 85 and the file type to png-24 and saved.

Thus far I have added content to DrupNewb using Blogs and Images. I now see that stories are referred to as "articles in their simplest form". So, here is my first story. Let's just see what this does...

Hmm, looks like a story is pretty similar to a blog entry. That might partly be because my blog doesn't have too much fancy stuff added to it.

Here's another easy one. I was taking a peek at Menu Admin (Home » Administer » Site building » Menus --> List), and I saw that Search was marked as "(disabled)". Search seems like a pretty handy thing to have turned on, so I just clicked "enable". How easy is that!

This one is pretty simple. I was reading about Blocks, and so went to Home » Administer » Site building » Blocks. On that page you have a list of Blocks you are currently showing in a region, and below that a list that you can add to a Region. If you want to add a Block that has a region of <none>, just use the drop down list to select a region to add it to.

To put the "Latest image" in my left side nav I simply went to Home » Administer » Site building » Blocks, found where "Latest image" had an image of <none>, selected "Left sidebar", and pressed "Save blocks".

Cats Cappuccino (White) and Puffin (Grey & White) hanging out in the living room.

Cats Percy (B&W) and Wooster (Orange) hanging out by the kitchen.

First I uploaded the image module to allow me to upload images. Then I uploaded the image assist module to allow me to add an image to a blog post.

Now, it is time to add images to galleries. This wasn't too hard, as I already had the modules I needed installed. I just went into
Home » Administer » Content management » Image galleries and added two galeries. I added "Drupal Photos" and then "Cat Photos". I added the cat photos gallery because I wanted to see what using two photo galleries was like and I have so darn many cat photos on my hard drive.

My battered copy of Pro Drupal Developement by John K. VanDyk and Matt Westgate.

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