I am completely new to drupal and site design in general. Drupal is what I use on my site, and I do have to say it is a nice thing to have.
The biggest thing to conquer when using it is understanding the layout. The page is divided into multiple sections, the main sections being your sidebars and your content. Inside those sections you can place what drupal calls "blocks". I think this is about the only thing I have really gotten proficient with so far. Basically you put php or html code in the blocks. You could even put text in there too. Doesn't matter. But then that block is a part of your website that you can put anywhere. Like if you wanted to put it on the sidebar, you would go to administer, site configuration, blocks in the navigation menu. Then you would give that block a weight, which tells the block how low or high to be on the section in relationship to other blocks. So you could put in an adsense block, or a calendar block, or an "about this site" block. Anything you wanted.
Taxonomy is basically like the tree of terms on your site. If you think about it like file explorer, lets use blogs for instance, blogs would be the c:\ drive. Then would come your terms that reside inside the blogs. Terms like Fruit, Dogs, Cars, Etc would be the main directories. Then the would have subdirectories like apples,pears,oranges/dalmations,pitbuls,bulldogs/ etc. Taxonomy is just a way to classify terms your blogs and pages use. These terms are referred to as "tags" in drupal. Taxonomy isn't really super important unless you plan to organize your site's blogs/stories/picture galleries to an exact directory tree per say.
Nodes are just your content. Its like giving a number to each post. Like the first blog you write will be node 1... so in your site if you typed
www.yoursite.com/node/1 you would get the first peice of content created. I haven't really figured out how its all organized yet, but I'll give you a little tip. If you create a content type called a page in drupal, and then wrote html or php code on that page, you could create links to that page in drupal by just linking to that node. So if your node is lets say node 23... then if you did a standard link on a "sidebar" in a "block", you could have your page pop up in drupal in the body of your site. You can check this out on my site under the games option in the menu on the left. It just links to a page I created in Drupal to tell people games are coming soon.
I know thats a lot to get down right away. It took me a day or two to even understand blocks on my own. But just keep using drupal and you'll find its a nifty little thing to work with. Now if only I could get drupal to look ok in internet explorer (which is my next big task). Also feel free to email me if you have any questions...
JessFoddrill@NukeYourBrain.Com . I might not be able to answer them all, but I can tell you what I know so far.
Jess Foddrill
Drupal Tutorials?
That being said, there aren't many out there. I was looking for some too when I first started out with it a few months ago. I couldn't find any so just learned to play around with it myself.
Linear Mode
