Thursday, July 7, 2011

Ebooks, Videos, and other resources to learn Drupal.

E-Books Recommended

1) Using Drupal - Byron, Walker, et al - O'Reilly
2) Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions - Noble - Packt
3) Drupal 6 Site Blueprints - Ogunjobi - Packt
4) Drupal Multimedia - Winborn - Packt
5) Learning Drupal 6 Module Development - Butcher - Packt




Video Tutorials

You can get video tutorials of Drupal from some premium sites like
I tried using tutorials from Lynda.com,but I recommend you to use ebook and websites to learn Drupal.
(All lynda.com tutorials are available on torrent)

Beginner Level Tutorials

Here are some basic things you want to know before you get started with Drupal. Some easy readings on this page. It would be worth while to make some notes.


http://drupal.org/getting-started/

 If you want a complete book for beginners checkout Drupal cookbook for Beginners [PDF] . If you want to read it online check this link.

http://drupal.org/handbook/customization/tutorials/beginners-cookbook

If you are looking for begginer level instructions on installing, and configuring drupal, changing themes, making basic search engine setups, and do backup/ upgrades etc. you will enjoy this tutorial,

http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/drupal-tutorial/


This is the ultimate , Site recipes . As with cooking, there are many ways to assemble a Drupal site. You can arrive at widely different destinations with the same or similar modules. By perusing these guides, you will be able to decide for yourself what is appropriate for your site.

Another one page introduction on IBM website on "Getting Started with Drupal"

This article is not complete till I mention about the most important of all the tutorials which is Video Tutorials and Screencasts . A huge collection of videos from different sites will leave no stone unturned.

Installing Drupal/LAMP in Ubuntu

Drupal

Drupal is a free and open source content management system (CMS) and content management framework (CMF) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License.It is used as a back-end system for at least 1.5% of all websites worldwide ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and government sites including whitehouse.gov and data.gov.uk.

Drupal runs on any computing platform that supports both a web server capable of running PHP (including Apache, IIS, Lighttpd, and nginx) and a database (such as MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MongoDB or Microsoft SQL Server) to store content and settings. So Drupal requires PHP, Apache/IIS/Lighttpd/ngix and MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL/SQLite/MongoDB/Microsoft SQL Server (web server and database can be any one of the above listed as per your requirement and interest).

Now lets install Drupal, I can tell you that there are many methods to install and configure Drupal in Ubuntu, so I will suggest you one which I found very easy and working.

  • For installing Drupal(in Ubuntu/ linux mint) you have to install Lamp first ( ie Linux-Apache-Mysql-Php)

    • sudo apt-get install tasksel

    • sudo tasksel install lamp-server

    • Running these two commands in your terminal will install Lamp,during installation select your server as lamp server, apache and you will be asked to enter your database password for root user.

  1. Download the Drupal core file from Drupal.org you can download any of the desired version of Drupal available.
  2. Now unzip and copy the contents of the downloaded zip file to the location

    /var/www/Drupal

    using the command unzip your downloaded file

    sudo tar xvf (filename i e name of the downloaded zip file)

    eg sudo tar xvf Drupal-6.tar.gz

    now move the contents to

    /var/www/Drupal


    use the command

    sudo mv (source destination) (desired destination)

    eg sudo mv drupal-6 /var/www/drupal

  3. Now access local drupal website usinghttp://localhost/drupal

  4. You will be asked to change the privileges of file /var/www/drupal/sites/default/settings.php

    cd var/www/drupal/sites/default


    sudo cp settings.php default.settings.php

    sudo chmod a+w settings.php

    sudo mkdir files

    sudo chmod a+w files/


  5. Your Website is ready now. Learn Drupal from online resources or from books, to know more about resources click here.

You should now install Phpmyadmin (recommended)

phpMyAdmin is an open source tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL with the use of a Browser. It can perform various tasks such as creating, modifying or deleting databases, tables, fields or rows; executing SQL statements; or managing users and permissions.

Here i will tell you how to install phpmyadmin from package.....
  • Go to your terminal window now enter
    • sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin
    • You will be asked to select your web-server select apache 2
    • Once phpMyAdmin is installed point your browser to http://localhost/phpmyadmin to start using it. You should be able to login using any users you've setup in MySQL. If no users have been setup, use admin with no password to login.
    • Your phpmyadmin is installed now
  • In case if your browser displays an error "404 not found" kind then try to reinstall your phpmyadmin and configure it to apache
    • sudo dpkg-reconfigure -plow phpmyadmin
  • If your browser is still displaying some error message enter these two commands given below to include the phpMyadmin-shipped Apache configuration into Apache
    • sudo ln -s /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf /etc/apache2/conf.d/phpmyadmin.conf
    • sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

If you have any kind of doubt please feel free to post them here