Newbie Drupal Experiences
Every once in a while you start with something new.. you're used to being rather expercienced on different topics in open source , having written an article and a book left or right but there comes a day when you will feel a total newbie again :)
About 10 years ago I was mostly into technical webdevelopment , perl, php, oracle plsql , java servlets , coldfusion stuff like that.. I stopped building corporate websites about 7-8 years ago when I realised I was spending more time helping people to build the infrastructure to host those sites than actually building the sites. (That and the fact that I really got bored with people wanting greener green)
So fast forward to about 5-6 months ago where I suddenly felth the need again to start writing code for a small pet project of mine.
I wanted a framework where I could jumpstart with different features I needed such as usermanagement and a blog feature.
As I mentionned earlier this week .. everybody seems to be using Drupal these days and has similar newbie feelings :)
Dag is posting about his experiences on how to use Drupal as a personal blog. So my current project is different.
For a personal blog I wouldn't be using the blog module either has he describes, but as I wanted different authors .. I understood I do need it.
I had the same problem with the Vocabularies and Terms .. Upon starting I really didn't understand what they meant for my blog. So I recreated the categories I had in dotclear in there. I deleted them from my database after a month, when I figured out how to use tagging in the blog :)
So what do you need when you want to go one step further, like getting content from a database. So here is where the I probably went totally wrong and where the documentation could use a hand.
I started out writing my own module where I use some drupal functions and custom php code. Turns out there is something like CCK but I`m still not sure if CCK is the thing I need (or how to use it)
I`m pretty sure the way I`m writing my modules totally wrong also.
I'm having 1 big file in which I do everything.. Pretty crappy if you ask me but I don't really find another way .. Or should I create multiple modules ?
Luckily this is just a hobby, won't be big and professional like... It's just a project to learn and I got a different dayjob ..
However my fear is that other people probably won't realize how wrong the
are using a certain technology and will offer their services to customers :(
So I`m nagging some people about a new Drupal User group meeting.
Guess Dag and I will learn some stuff there ;)