Yes! Finally Clear Well Written about Building a Professional Website with Drupal

Following a link from http://drupal.org/planet I came across the excellent series by IBM developers about developing a profession website using open source technology.  In fact, the series focuses on using Drupal as the core. 

The professionalism in the process used to redesign the website and the detail with which these articles are written make this series a must read for anyone interested in community websites. 

Some items to highlight include:

• The whole introduction and details about the design process
• How they analyzed and compared different open-source content management systems
• Decision to use Drupal
• All of Part 2: Design for an effective user experience
• Structuring content for theming using XHTML
• Styling content for theming using CSS
• And finally, a well worded, well explained, detailed document describing Using taxonomies in Drupal

I am becoming more and more of a fan of the content management system Drupal.

The developers and community at Drupal.org have recently released the beta version of the new 5.0 release. This new version of the Drupal CMS received many new features, including improved performance, a new administrative interface, and a new slick default template.

I decided to download the beta and give it a test drive. Here are some of the things I found during installation and setup.

New Web based Install, Makes it Easier for Everyone

After dropping the drupal files into the main directory for my test site, I created the mysql database and then pointed my browser to the new site.

Here is what comes up:

I choose my database type (mysql) from the radio box, entered the name of my Drupal database, along with the username and password to access the database. Then I hit “Save configuration”.

That was it. My new Drupal install was complete. Nice.

Drupal Website Setup

After completing my install in about 90 seconds, I followed the link to visit “your new site”. From my new Drupal home page I was guided by a five step list to start using my new Drupal site.

So I:

Created my first account

including:

1. Choosing my password
2. Setting my user time zone

At this point it would have been good to be taken back to that five point list. However, I had to go back to my home page to seed the five point list again.