The war with Drupal

I’ve been building a site using the Drupal CMS over the last week.

The build was not helped by me having a cold and feeling miserable. And I have to say that for the first couple of days it was a real struggle.

I knew a little about Drupal from a familiarisation play around a little while ago, and that really helped me get going. But I found that in order to do what I wanted I had to download and install a bunch of modules.

Another problem I’m faced with is the nature of the site, which is largely brochure-ware. While Drupal can handle a site like that, that’s not really what it was designed for. So that means doing a bunch of customisation to get things working the way the client wants.

As I say, I really struggled early on to get it all working the way I wanted, until Wednesday.

After reading lots of tutorials and trying all sorts of different strategies, I finally figured it out. The big secret to getting things working is the Views module. And this is not part of the core build!! But using the Views module let me display the dynamic content on pages and in widgets that I wanted. And once I’d figured this out, it was all on for young and old. In no time at all I had most of the important parts of the site built and operating exactly the way it was supposed to. I only had to add one line of code to the template file to get a specific layout, and apart from that the site is all built with standard module code.

So if you’re looking at building a site with Drupal and you’re struggling to get it to work the way you want, check out the Views module and combine it with the Blocks to put the content you want in the places you want. Once you get that sorted you’ll be surprised at just how easy it can be to get a site up and running.