This past Saturday, I attended DrupalCamp NH, a one-day introduction for people new to Drupal who want to learn more about it, including the basics of setting up a Drupal website. While I’ve played with Drupal in the past, I always had trouble with it due to its complexity and rather confusing administration interface, and would invariably give up and move on to something else. Still, I was fully aware that Drupal was one of the most popular and widely-used content management systems in the world, so an inexpensive opportunity to learn the basics in a location that’s pretty close to where I live seemed like a no-brainer.

After some initial trouble with the wireless network at the venue (Southern New Hampshire University’s brand-new Academic Center building), the sessions began with an overview of Drupal basics, ranging from terminology to Drupal’s capabilities to the Drupal community. After that was a session on infrastructure, covering server requirements and Acquia Drupal, a custom distribution of Drupal that includes a number of essential modules to help inexperienced people (such as me!) quickly set up a Drupal website. The presenters had us install Acquia Drupal on our laptops — it even comes with its own webserver — and walked us through the initial configuration. It was at this point that I discovered the absolutely wonderful administration menu module, which would have made my previous experimenting with Drupal a lot easier if I’d known about it at the time.

The next session was about content types, starting with nodes, which are the main building blocks for pages. The node system is flexible, allowing you to create custom content types, allowing for all sorts of uses.

After lunch, we tackled the extremely complicated topic of Views, which can be best described as “a visual query builder to render content from the Drupal database” (quote taken from the DrupalCamp NH curriculum). To say it was confusing would be an understatement — the session didn’t end till over an hour after it was supposed to end, sailing right past both its own end time and the end time of the session that was supposed to follow it. Views are definitely something I’m going to have to play around with some more, but I can already see some potential uses for them.

At this point, there was only about an hour left before DrupalCamp was supposed to end, so the last two sessions were somewhat compressed, starting with a session on theming basics that covered selecting and customizing Drupal themes. The last session was “Drupal Recipes”, which was more of a “Where do you go from here?” look at various resources available to people who want to work with Drupal.

All in all, it was a good introduction to Drupal. It certainly didn’t scare me away from it. In fact, I’ve registered to attend Drupal Design Camp Boston 2010, which is happening next month. That will give me a few weeks to play around with Drupal some more, though I imagine I’ll either install Acquia Drupal on my desktop computer or set up a Drupal installation online, rather than break out the laptop every time I want to play around.

The really nice part about diving into Drupal now? I’ll have a new skill I can add to my resume. That’s a win in my book.