Slides from an introduction to Drupal training, basics concepts and examples for better understanding about Drupal.

1. Intro to Drupal

2. Commerce Guys is the
COMPANY
Based in
Paris, France
Ann Arbor, Michigan
London, UK

3. About me
● Drupal developer at Commerce Guys
● Drupal Association board director (community
elected)
● London newbie!
● Building Drupal websites since 2007.
Pedro Cambra – pedro@commerceguys.com

4. What is
Drupal is an free, open-source content
management system, an highly extensible and
versatile framework to run from the simplest to the
most complex web projects.
Drupal allows you to build and launch web
applications with a large amount of work already
done for you.

5. What is
Benjamin Melançon – The definitve guide to Drupal 7

6. Drupal is a CMS...
● Provides full control over the content publication
workflow.
● Content categorisation and management.
● Role and user management. Privacy and access
control.
● Content presentation in a variety of formats.
● Extensible and modular system.

7. But a Content Management
Framework too
● Tools provided to build a CMS tailored for your
needs.
● Form system, database abstraction layer,
Caching tools at several levels...
● Schema builder (field system) and query builder
(Views module)
● Distribution / Packaging support.
● API for developers. http://api.drupal.org/

8. Origin of Drupal
● Designed in 2001 for
controlling a local network
of users.
● The initial name “drop.org”
was a typo of his creator,
Dries Buytaert
● He wanted to register
dorp.org.
● Drupal is the English word
of dutch “druppel” meaning Dries Buytaert
drop.

9. Drupal growth
● Drupal empowers more than 2% of all the sites
online.
● Almost 1 million users registered in drupal.org
in more than 200 countries, speaking 180
languages.
● Drupal 7 sites triple Drupal 6 sites.

10. Drupal Community

11. Drupalcon Brussels 2006

12. Drupalcon Munich 2012

13. What Drupal can
do?

15. Simple sites
Drupal is the perfect choice for fairly simple
sites such a personal page or blog.
● Drupal provides solid content management
by default.
● Comments support, permissions, blocks...
● Great number of extensions (modules) and
contributed templates

16. Complex sites
When designing a complex sites, Drupal
provides the ability to extend basic features to
achieve full customization.
● Database layer abstraction, entities vs
content.
● “Building” extensions such a query builder
(Views) or workflow manager (Rules).
● Good API for developers when really specific
requirements are provided.

17. Social Networks
A social network requires a high component of
interaction between the users and granular
privacy layers.
● Drupal provides a great control over
permissions.
● Support for roles out of the box, user profiles
(Profile2) an groups (Organic groups) as
contributions.
● Flagging content and other social network
interactions also available.

18. News sites
News sites require content categorisation, high
performance and strong SEO support.
● Drupal provides content categorisation out of
the box, tagging or category sets.
● Solid integration with high-level performance
tiers, Varnish, Nginx, Solr...
● SEO friendly by default, RDF support. Other
plugins help (Pathauto, Metadata)

19. Corporate sites
Drupal controls which pages are published, also
provides good content interaction and visual
customizations.
● Easy way to generate static pages out of the
box.
● Social content such as comments, link sharing
or blog capabilities.
● Responsive templates available, easy to plug
and play other or custom.

20. Web applications
The web ecosystem is evolving towards more
complex needs, availability to display content in
diverse devices and responsiveness.
● Good source of responsive templates.
● jQuery and jQuery UI out of the box, other
libraries available out of the box.
● Drupal community has embraced the “mobile
first” approach. Drupal 8 will be mobile friendly
out of the box.

21. REST servers
It is possible to use Drupal just as backend of
one or multiple applications build just as front-
end consumers.
● Expose your content as JSON, XML in diverse
ways.
● Full REST API servers (Services) or just a bit of
the website (Views data export)

22. E-commerce
Drupal is an excellent platform to build e-
commerce systems, extensible and secure.
● Drupal commerce is a solid and mature
extension to build e-commerce sites on top of
Drupal.
● Hundreds of payment gateways and other
extensions allow to build complex e-commerce
platforms tailored to the customer needs.

23. What's inside?

24. Drupal technology stack
Source

25. Drupal architecture

26. Files structure

27. Structure of modules
Source: Dries Buytaert

28. Drupal distributions

32. Who is using
Drupal?

48. Demo time!

49. Further resources

50. Video resources
● Four weeks of Drupal
● Learn Views & Learn Rules
● Drupalize.me
● Lynda.com
● Buildamodule.com
● Modulesunraveled.com

51. Video resources
● Four weeks of Drupal
● Learn Views & Learn Rules
● Drupalize.me
● Lynda.com
● Buildamodule.com
● Modulesunraveled.com

52. Books
Drupal books are listed in http://drupal.org/books
Some recommendations:
● The definitive guide to Drupal 7
●
Using Drupal (2nd edition)
● Drupal user's guide
● Drupal 7: Visual Quickstart guide

53. Meetups, groups & camps
Learning Drupal meetup
Drupal drop in sprint
Drupalcamp Scotland (April)
Drupalcamp Dublin (May)
Drupalcon Portland & Drupalcon Prague
Check out drupical.com

54. Drupal Association
● Maintaining and updating the hardware and
software infrastructure of Drupal.org
● Empowering project participation and
contribution
● Community Cultivation Grants
● Legal work and advocacy for Drupal project
● Funding of Scholarships
● Organising DrupalCons around the world

55. http://www.flickr.com/photos/drachmann/327122302/

56. ¡Muchas gracias!
@pcambra
pedro@commerceguys.com
cambrico.net
Drupal.org profile