These are the notes from Darren Huckey's presentation on Drupal at our last Refresh meeting.

1. DRUPAL: Your New Best Friend

2. Why Drupal?
• MTV UK (www.mtv.co.uk)
• •
NASA (www.nasa.gov) Recovery (www.recovery.gov)
• •
Playstation Asia United Nations
(asia.playstation.com) (endpoverty2015.org)
• •
Flock Browser (flock.com) Warner Bros Records
(www.warnerbrosrecords.com)
• Greenpeace
•
UK(www.greenpeace.org.uk) Discovery Channel DE
(www.discoveryclub.de)
• Ubuntu (www.ubuntu.com)
• The Greatful Dead
• The Onion (www.theonion.com)
(thegreatfuldead.net)
• Popular Science
• AOL (dev.aol.com)
(www.popsci.com)
• Yahoo (research.yahoo.com)
• Lifetime (www.mylifetime.com)
• Lime.com
• Amnesty International (http://
•
www.amnesty.org) The New York Observer
(observer.com)
• The Harvard Voice
(www.thehvoice.com)

3. Why Drupal?
• Advanced URL Control — Unlike WordPress, Drupal
gives you precise control over URL structure. Each item
of content in Drupal (called a node) can be given a
custom URL (called a URL alias). In WordPress you are
generally limited to one type of permalink URL for all
posts. You can override the quot;post slugquot;, but it's much
less precise than Drupal's URL aliases. You can also
automate custom URL structures for each different
content type with the Pathauto Module. The Global
Redirect Module will automatically 301 redirect the
internal Drupal URL to the custom URL alias. Unlike
many other content management systems, Drupal's
content pages have nice clean URLs.
1

4. Why Drupal?
• Custom Content Types and Views — You can use the
Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views Modules to
create new content types and create advanced custom
views for them without writing any code. A few
examples of quot;content typesquot; are quot;blog postsquot;, quot;news
storiesquot;, quot;forum postsquot;, quot;tutorialsquot;, quot;classified adsquot;,
quot;podcastsquot;. You can create as many custom content
types as you would like and display them in many
different ways. Most content management systems
would require writing code to accomplish these tasks,
but there is no programming knowledge required to do
them in Drupal.
2

5. Why Drupal?
• Revision Control — You can configure Drupal to save a
new version of your pages every time they are editing.
That means that you can go back to view or revert old
revisions if you want.
3

6. Why Drupal?
• Taxonomy — Drupal has a powerful taxonomy
(category) system that allows you to organize and tag
content. Each Drupal quot;vocabularyquot; (set of categories)
can be limited to certain content types. For example,
you could have blog contents that allowed free tagging
(similar to WordPress categories), while your news
section might have a different vocabulary (set of
categories) that could only be selected from an existing
list of categories. You can also have hierarchical
categories, with single or multiple parent categories.
Drupal's advanced taxonomy features, combined with
CCK and Views, allows you to easily target all of those
long-tail keywords that you researched in Wordtracker.
4

7. Why Drupal?
• User Management — Drupal was designed for
community-based Web sites and has strong user role
and access control functionality. You can create as many
custom user roles with custom access levels as you
need. For example you could create the following roles,
each with different levels of access to your features:
quot;anonymous visitorquot;, quot;authenticated userquot;, quot;moderatorquot;,
quot;editorquot;, quot;webmasterquot;, quot;adminquot;. You can keep the
advanced user management features (like multiple
blogs) turned off if you don't want them, enabling them
later if your site grows to a point where you would like
to add more community features.
5

8. Why Drupal?
• Page Titles & Meta Tags — Drupal's Page Title Module
gives you custom control of your HTML <title>
elements, while the Meta Tags Module gives you control
over your pages' individual meta description tags. This
is difficult in some content management systems, but
it's easy with Drupal.
6

9. Why Drupal?
• Excellent Documentation — Documentation includes
the official handbooks, the massive API Reference,
numerous tutorials, blogs, videos, and podcasts, and the
excellent new book Pro Drupal Development. There is
even a Drupal Dojo community where you can learn how
to become a Drupal ninja.
7

10. Why Drupal?
• PHP Template — Drupal uses the PHP Template theme
engine by default. Theming in Drupal is easier than
theming in WordPress and doesn't necessarily require
any PHP knowledge. Drupal's Theme Developer Guide is
a great resource. I also recommend reading Chapter 8
in Pro Drupal Development.
8

11. Why Drupal?
• Drupal Cookbooks — If you want a feature that is not
built into Drupal by default, chances are that someone
has already written a code snippet for it and posted it in
the code snippets section of Drupal.org.
9

12. Why Drupal?
• Large & Friendly Community — With so many major
sites using Drupal, it's not going away soon. For an idea
of the size of the developer community, take a look at
the long list of community-contributed modules. The
Drupal forum is highly active and are a great place to
get your Drupal questions answered. You can also find
Drupal support on IRC chat on channels #drupal-
support and #drupal-dojo. To meet other Drupal users
in your area, visit Drupal Groups.
10