Early Drupal impressions

I downloaded and installed Acquia-Drupal today to begin playing around and learning how this whole Drupal CMF works. I’ll admit, I’m no complete stranger to CMSes and publishing software having worked for a while at Time Magazine on various publishing and early CMSes and elsewhere, but the initial learning curve for Drupal does seem to be slightly steep, as I’ve read many many times – for exampe in this comparison of Plone, Joomla, Drupal. It’s not so much the administrative interface and terminology, though it is definitely something to get accustomed to what with terms like node, module, etc. It’s the confusing choice of options in some places and overwhelming amount of modules.

Some questions:

• Is there a guide to these modules that logically categorizes or gives a usefuly taxonomy for browsing them?
• Has anyone, beside the Acquia-Drupal installation, created something like “installation packs” where it’s Drupal but pre-packaged with modules most people will need to make a: corporate intranet, large website, blog or community forum site, etc.?
• As I work for a large, non-profit organization and non-profits are using Drupal (Oxfam, Greenpeace, etc.), is there a “non-profit’s guide to using Drupal” out there?

Obviously, as I’m just dipping my feet in the water, I’m not frustrated or deterred by Drupal yet. I did find some things, namely creating my first few test content pages and changing the menu items, very very easy to do. So, with time, I’m sure I’ll master Drupalese and get our sites migrated into the Drupalverse. Oh, I am reading the new O’Reilly book, Using Drupal, and I highly recommend it.

Blogging about…

I’m a librarian who has morphed into an information architect/web manager.  I work for a large, non-profit organization where we are in the beginning phases of implementing Drupal, the open-source CMS or CMF (Content Management Framework)  to manage our sites. My background includes some of the following:

- Metadata Librarian at the British Library in London working on a sound digitisation project

- Multimedia Librarian at the City University of New York’s ‘College of Technology‘ in Brooklyn (fun stuff – got to organize film screenings, guest speakers)

- Research Librarian at Time Magazine

- Internship in preservation at Columbia University (my heart is still with dusty, ol’ things – oh, and ultrasonic welders!)

- Library school at Palmer, LIU

and various library posts at the University of Georgia where I did my undergrad…

I guess that’s how one starts this whole blogging process. I’ve just found lately that one can’t say everything via Twitter (though I still try!). Follow me there: twitter.com/mavergames.

So, I’d reckon this blog is worth reading if you want to follow my thoughts on implementing Drupal, all things library & info science, semantic web, and sometimes music, which I like very much…