Drupal FastTrack report
The first Drupal FastTrack at OpenAdvantage ran on 27th and 28th July 2006. Elliot Smith, who ran the course, gives his impressions.
Compared to other high visibility content management systems like Mambo and Plone, Drupal has kept a relatively low profile. On one hand, it has a reputation as being hard to master (unlike Mambo's reputation); on the other, it is not treated as seriously as products like Plone, which are considered "enterprise class". The aim of the course was to dispel some of the misconceptions about Drupal and help them see how it represents a "middle way" between the easy to use but inflexible Mambo, and the flexible but difficult Plone.
We started out with a general introduction to Drupal before getting down to the nitty gritty. I made a choice on the course to build a "mini hosting company" for the attendees to use: they would each get their own website and hosting, accessible via FTP. I figured that this would accurately reflect a typical user's Drupal environment. The alternative would have been to provide each attendee with their own web and database server; however, this would not have given them a feel for how to put their website onto shared hosting, which is where many of them would end up doing their deployments. Thanks to XAMPP, it was pretty easy to build a mini hosting environment, complete with FTP server.
Once we had our Drupal instances up and running, we proceeded to explore Drupal terminology, basic content management, customisation (e.g. basic settings, installing 3rd party modules, menu management), writing themes, input formats and filters, WYSIWYG editing, user management (roles and permissions), and other topics like backups and log files.
The trainees came up with lots of good questions, many about specific projects they had in mind. The thing that struck me about Drupal while I tried to come up with reasonable answers is that Drupal is extremely flexible; and that this is both its strength and weakness. A strength, in that most of the time I could say "Yes, Drupal could do that; perhaps you could do this...then this...". But a weakness in the sense that you are quite close to the bare metal with Drupal, and really working with a framework for building CMSs, rather than a fully-formed CMS. There is much work to do with a Drupal site to get to a finished, complete website (more than with Mambo, say). But, once you've got to the finished product, it is far easier to extend, customise and maintain a Drupal site than a Mambo one.
I think the course was satisfying, and achieved its aim of introducing Drupal concepts and helped the attendees see how it can be bent to their will! Hopefully we will see some interesting products emerging from the companies of some of the attendees before too long.
You can get the articles here (PDF format inside zip file; other formats available on request; distributed under a Creative Commons license).
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