One of the most important resources you will need in the coming days, weeks, months, and years is the Drupal online community. Unlike other open-source projects, which are sometimes criticized for their lack of coherent and in-depth support structures, you will find that Drupal is very well done and fairly easy to learn your way around. There are a host of categories ranging from information, polls, forums, and news to support, which can be found at the home page: http://drupal.org.
It is strongly recommended that you regularly make use of drupal.org and constantly use different elements and sections in order to become proficient at extracting the information and software you require to run your enterprise—especially since the Drupal site will change from time to time! For precisely this reason, you might also notice that there are small differences between this book and Drupal itself.
All the information contained in the site is well organized and easy to access from the main navigation bar at the top of the page, as shown here:
Each and every tab in the navigation bar has a host of its own links and pages although there are some categories that contain inter-related topics. You should note, that when we refer to community in this book, we are talking about the entire Drupal community, including all the support structures, developers, users, and so on—not to be confused with the Community tab on the front page that refers more to the different Drupal communities around the world (more on this in a moment).
At any rate, let's go through each and every one quickly to see what they have to offer.
To begin, the Support section can be regarded as a kind of catch-all page, and actually contains a number of links to the various other community pages, many of which can also be opened by using their tabs in the main navigation bar. For example, you can navigate to the Drupal handbook (to be discussed shortly) from the Online documentation section if you need to find out some basic information on Drupal, as shown here:
Briefly, in this section:
- Documentation and help facilities are provided in the Online documentation section, and include help on some common problems as well as installation and general information.
- Links to security advisories and announcements as well as the option to subscribe to the security announcement mailing list or RSS feed are provided under the Security section.
- Links to the forums, in case you need help, are provided under the Forums and Support section, as well as archives and a Tips for posting to the Drupal forums link.
- If you are not an English language speaker, or your community predominantly speaks some other language, then it is worthwhile checking out some of the other language sites under the Other languages section, which includes German, French, Spanish, and Afrikaans.
- Links to a number of professional services related to Drupal, including hosting and consulting, are provided under the Professional services and hosting section.
- Bug reports can be sent in by visiting the Bug reports section. Please be aware that you should always check whether or not a bug has been reported before submitting your own report. Any submission incurs a cost in terms of man-hours because someone has to look over it, and the time wastage can be substantial if everyone keeps reporting the same bug over and over again.
- The Feature requests section gives you the opportunity to look over what other people would like to see incorporated into Drupal as shown here:
Of course, you can also submit your own requests.
- There is also an interesting option to obtain support over an IRC channel. IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, allows for real-time, typed discussions over the Internet. Joining a group like this is obviously a great advantage in that it immediately gives you access to many other Drupal people.
- There is a support Mailing list section that you can join, a Developer support section, and a forum to raise issues about the actual Drupal website under the Drupal.org problems section. Recently, a new section entitled Books about Drupal has been added too.
If in doubt as to where to go, the Support page is probably where you should start off. More often than not though, you will have a fairly good idea of what you need, and should be able to go straight there.
This section is a great repository of information, catering for a wide variety of different needs. The content is gathered into five main sections as shown here:
Each of these categories contains a series of links to informative pages (that often in turn contain links to other pages) that do a good job of explaining their respective topics. It's worth pointing out that a block appears on the left-hand side of these pages, containing links to related topics under the same category heading in order to help you navigate through the information with ease. The following screenshot shows the Is Drupal right for you? page:
You are urged to look through at least the first section before moving on to the following chapter in order to learn as much about Drupal as possible. It is also a good idea to use these handbooks in tandem with this book so that you can complement the practical advice and experience you gain here with reference-type material presented on the site.
The forums are probably your single greatest problem-solving resource and information-based asset. Unlike the other types of information on the site (with the exception of the Freenode Drupal IRC), which are largely static, written answers or guides, the forums provide you with an interactive environment in which you can learn and extend your knowledge. Of course, they also provide you with a medium for sharing whatever you have learned as well.
At the time of writing, there were approximately 100,000 support-related posts alone. This should give you a good idea of how widely used these forums are. The following screenshot shows the Forum home page as well as the first few forum categories. From the large number of posts you can tell that this is already a fairly large repository of knowledge and hopefully you will take the time to add to it yourself.
Looking at the entire page, there are three main forum categories—General, Support, and Development—that in turn have a number of subcategories to make navigating the structure fairly easy. You will also notice that there is a block on the right-hand side of the page containing a list of the most recent posts. As well as this, you can also use the search tool, shown at the top right-hand side of the page or at http://drupal.org/search/node, to search for relevant information or users.
Finally, assuming you are a registered (and logged-on) Drupal user, you can also post new topics to the forum using the link given under the page's main heading as shown here:
Before you start posting off hundreds of questions and salutations, please be aware that there is a certain etiquette to using these forums, and it should be followed at all times. Look at the following page before you begin making any posts to the site: http://drupal.org/forum-posting. A quick summary is as follows:
- Make sure you have searched the forums for similar posts already. Use those posts instead of creating redundant information.
- Make your forum post titles informative and meaningful.
- Ensure that you submit a good amount of system-specific information in your support queries—for example, mention the Drupal version you are using along with the database and database version.
- Bear in mind that not everyone using the forum is a native English speaker; so some posts may be construed as rude or abrupt even when that is not the intention.
- Remain polite and reasonable—even if you are frustrated over a particular problem.
- Donate some time to responding to and helping other posters.
- If you would like, enable your contact tab so that people can offer support via email. You can do this by editing your contact information as shown here:
Some of you may have noticed the link entitled Active forum discussions in the screenshot before last. Clicking on this link brings up a list of the topics that have recent posts, as shown here:
If you would prefer to view the discussions that you personally have contributed to, then click the My forum discussions link instead.
We will be visiting this section again in the following chapter when we begin to set up everything in preparation for the development of your site. However, there are a few interesting points to note before we get there. The first is that you need to be quite careful about the Drupal version, or indeed modules and themes, you download because each successive version makes changes and improvements on previous versions, but also sometimes messes up compatibility with other features.
For example, you can see that the downloads page provides us with some interesting information on compatibility with PHP from the following screenshot:
As you can see, Drupal 4.5 will not work with PHP 5. Now, this in itself is no great problem because it is quite likely that your hosting services will remain with PHP 4 for some time yet. However, at some stage most service providers will upgrade to PHP 5 support since PHP 5 is a far more sophisticated language than its predecessor. Knowing this, you might immediately say that this doesn't worry us because Drupal 4.6 is available (and so is 4.7).
That's quite right, but if you decide to add a module (by this I mean that at some stage you will want to add a module) then viewing the projects page athttp://drupal.org/project, or by clicking the Downloads tab gives:
You can see from the notes presented on this page, if you happen to need a module that was developed for Drupal 4.5, and you are using version 4.6, then you are shortly going to experience no small amount of frustration—this is especially valid at this time because 4.7 is brand new, and hence many modules have yet to be updated.
Problems like this can occur because modules are developed separately from the core, which means that it is up to the individual module developer to keep up to date with any changes coming from the main development team.
Naturally, not everyone will keep the modules up to date in a timely manner because often these developers are not getting paid and are under no obligation to do the work at all. They are simply providing us with the best code they can deliver when they can deliver it, and we should obviously be grateful for that.
In terms of how to use the download pages, it is worth noting that there are three links given at the bottom right of each downloadable item's box. These are Download, Find out more, and Bugs and feature requests. Obviously the first option is pretty self explanatory, but you should always take a look at the Find out more option before downloading anything to ensure that you are getting precisely what you want.
For example, the Find out more page for the Acidfree project contains information on Known limitations, a history of Updates, and plenty of material on Releases, Resources, Support, and Development—all pretty useful if you are not sure what Acidfree does to begin with.
That aside, the point of this section is that you should try to think carefully about what you want from your site before you go ahead and begin downloading everything. In the next chapter we will put words into practice and make use of this section to obtain a copy of Drupal.
At first glance you might be forgiven for thinking that there is very little you can meaningfully contribute to the Drupal community while you are still learning the software. As this is not entirely true, it is worthwhile seeing what there is available to us:
For starters, the easiest way to support Drupal is by making donations—I can all but hear the sighs and groans as you read this, but bear in mind what you are getting is absolutely free. You can also help market Drupal by writing reviews, or incorporating the Druplicon onto your site and so on. There is also always a need for people to help test, translate, support, and document Drupal.
Finally, once you have gained some experience and feel confident enough, you can look towards helping with Drupal development. Whatever you choose to do, you will find that any information or help you require in order to become pro-active within the community is readily available under the Contribute section.
These two sections are fairly self explanatory so I have lumped them together. The Contact page simply allows you to send an email off to the Drupal team, and you need to remember that no technical support queries will be addressed here—you must use the support forum for that. Simply ensure you select the most pertinent category from the drop-down list provided and away you go. An example is shown here:
That's easy enough to do! Moving on to the Community page, you can see that this gives you access to the various international Drupal communities as well as a few aggregated resources and tag services that you might find interesting to read:
Incidentally, a tagging service is simply a bunch of pages that have been associated with various keywords. This makes it easy to find content based on a user-defined categorization—doing things this way is also very flexible as you no longer have to pigeon-hole content into predefined categories. You can find more information on tags and tagging at the del.icio.us site: http://del.icio.us/help/tags.
That about wraps it up for our coverage of the Drupal community. You should feel fairly confident that you can use the site efficiently and that you can find help if needs be. Before we continue on to the next chapter, though, there is one more important issue we need to discuss …