(no subject)
I'm in the process of revising my personal website. Now, as a designer, I've created a lot of web pages, but I've never been the person to actually set them up online. This lack of experience has been a bit of an obstacle as I've been applying for work--employers want to know that you can personally jump onto their website and wrangle around code, etc. I did some research, and decided that Drupal would be the best system for me to work with, due to it's popularity and flexibility. I'm most likely to be working with Drupal sites at other companies, so having some practical experience with it will be useful.
My tech goddess, Mojo, got me through the initial installation, after I discovered the biggest weakness of Drupal. While it is "extensively documented", it's extensively documented by people who know Drupal. So you end up getting explanations that start out basic, like "Download Drupal 7 from this location". Check. "Install Drupal 7". Um...on my home computer? On my server? Where? And then you get sub notes to that instruction like "You may wish to override the kerblunkets* during installation by opening the nodules* file and editing the php code there to your preferred kerblunket settings." (A) What is a kerblunket? (B) Why might I want to override the settings? (C) How do I edit that code? and (D) Where would I find preferred settings that I want to use? *yes, I totally made up that sentence, but it's based on instructions that I've seen in every single "beginners" Drupal guide that I've looked at.
So Mojo came over, and after a hearty lunch, some unrelated chit-chat, and an hour or so of digging around the dusty corners of my site's directories and resetting admin rights, she was able to get Drupal 7 uploaded and ready to go. (Note to self: Do not suggest that you can install a website from scratch for a company)
Drupal is this weird mix of totally user friendly happy land, and totally imposing technical nightmare. You develop your website off of "Themes" and wonderfully enough, lots of developers have kindly created premade themes that you can install and "customize". This means that you can find a layout where you like all the features, load it up, and get running really quickly. That is...you can get running very quickly if you want to simply type your site name onto the header, load up a "logo", and play around with a few colors. If, for example, you are a designer who wants your website to express some of your personality with the background and header, you suddenly are shoved out of the land of premade themes into the desert of "customized theming". And you are right back in the nightmare of documentation. Actual instructions for creating a custom theme: 1. Create folder in 'Themes' folder labeled with name you would like your theme to have. 2. Inside that folder, create two more subfolders. 3. Create a text file labeled ".info" that includes 80 gazillion settings that the article implies need to be correct, but with no explanation of how to figure out what they should be for a beginner. Guess which step I got stuck at...
I am in this weird sort of purgatory. I've spent hours reading up at the main Drupal website, and I feel like I understand between 60-80% of what I'm supposed to do, but I can't figure out how to move from that point to having a functioning website, without giving up my plan of having a personalized "look". So, for the short term, this is my website. Stay tuned!