DrupalCamp Galway

Nathan and I attended DrupalCamp in Galway on Saturday. John Long also made a suprise appearance! It was very well organised and over 60 people attended. Unfortunately, we could only attend on the Saturday. Many thanks and congratulations to the organisers.

Drupal is an open source content management system with a very active contributing community. There’s a huge amount of contributed modules available that allow users to extend the core functionality of the software. As a result, Drupal is extremely flexible and configurable.

Custom themes can also be easily applied. There are many free themes available at themegarden.org. Here’s a list of my favourites:

• nitobe
• painted
• scruffy
• nigraphic
• fresh_media
• foliage
• fervens
• deco
• colorpaper
• burnt
• blossom
• blix
• shallowgrunge
• ifeeldirty

Complexity vs Flexibility

Unfortunately for new users, the amount of configuration options available is more than a bit overwhelming. I found that performing common tasks in a new install of Drupal is not as obvious as other content management systems, such as Wordpress or Joomla. Although well organised, the standard administrative interface feels overloaded with text.

There are a couple of ways to improve usability that were suggested by speakers at DrupalCamp. The Administration Menu module provides a nice drop down navigation bar containing common admin tasks that becomes available when an administrator logs in. The RootCandy theme is also an improvement on the default administration theme.

One gotcha when installing new modules is satisfying their dependent modules. You may have to track down and install dependent modules (and their dependent modules!) before you can active the original module you wanted.

While many “newbies” (including myself) complain about the complexity of Drupal, it was mentioned by Alan Burke yesterday that the Drupal developers do not want to improve simplicity at the cost of flexibility. At the end of the day, some basic knowledge of web development is required.

I think some of the group that didn’t come from a technical background were expecting a kind of “Word for Websites”. While installing and activating modules may be confusing, it sure beats the hell out of coding the functionality from scratch! Anyone who’s been there will appreciate the advantages of Drupal.

In order to put what we learned into practice, myself and Nathan created a simple website using Drupal. After 10 minutes, we had a nicely themed and secure interactive website ready to be filled with content.

Find Out More

If you’re interested in Drupal, a good place to start is by signing up to drupal.org and joining a group such as Ireland. The Ireland group contains a thread on useful links that were mentioned at DrupalCamp.

Drupal is also well documented thanks to contributors like Addison Berry.

UPDATE: Fair play to all who created the Zikomo and RSA sites from scratch on Sunday! Wow.