Drupal Beginners: A Brief Look at Drupal.org

Drupal can seem like a massive beast if you try and tackle it alone, but you can save a lot of time and energy by utilitizing it's community to your advantage. Whether you are troubleshooting on the forums or looking to keep up with what's going on in the cutting edge of Drupal - I'll outline a few tips and tricks to help you out.

The Drupal community is strong, but what does that mean? It means that there are developers all over the world who take the time to answer problems or issues that people are having with Drupal. The forums are constantly abuzz with problems of every variety. I can't tell you how many times I've been able to solve an issue simply by searching the forums. There is a 95% chance that whatever problem you're having, someone else has already had it and has consulted the forums and gotten a detailed explanation. Not only are the explanations usually quite thorough, but they are very polite as well. Needless to say but sometimes forums can get quite out of hand especially with short tempers and language barriers to deal with, but I have yet to see any hostile posts (knock on wood).

Search Queries

Remember to also be precise when using the search box at the top right of the screen. If you're getting a php error, be sure to copy and paste that error in order to get the most likely match. Also remember to be detailed with your query. So for example do not just type in "views module not working" because that will bring up a thousand posts. If it's something to do with a field or a block title etc, be sure to put that in first.

Support & Handbooks

Drupal.org provides many online handbooks as well that will walk you through all sorts of standard practices. Issues such as upgrading the Drupal core, or specific modules are well documented here and should be regarded as the practical standard whenever attempting any kind of update or customization.

In the coming weeks we'll have a look at some more resources, but that's all for now. If you have any of your own resources you'd like to share then feel free to leave a comment!