Drupal Tutorial for Beginners

Purpose
To help Drupal “newbies” who seemed overwhelmed on Drupal.org at first.
Background
The tips in this book are based upon a test site on PC, running Windows (Windows-specific
guidelines). Pretty much all of this is directly applicable to building a site directly on a
web server. Although it was based on Drupal 5, most of the process is the same for Drupal
6, although a few of the navigation buttons may have been renamed or moved.
Myths
You don’t have to know how to program (especially in PHP) to use Drupal. It’s an
advantage to have some basic knowledge of PHP, HTML, and CSS, but it is not required.
Some good resources for you:
W3 Schools – for virtually everything Internet-related.
The Official PHP Site – the full PHP implementation.
PHP Builder – some tutorials and code ready-to-use.
This tutorial uses HTML and tweaked CSS, but not one line of PHP code. Everything is
precompiled under the hood of: Drupal!
Some may think the learning curve for Drupal is going to be steep and it will take you
months, or even years, to get a web site up and running? Wrong. Hogwash! Your first,
largely static, web site with 36 pages can be up in less than a week after you installed your
first copy of Drupal. Then it’s just a matter of sorting out hosting arrangements and domain
names with a helpful hosting provider.
You can do it! Yes, YOU