Drupal for Beginners

Welcome to the world's most powerful, flexible, open-source content management system. Even if you have a stellar background in web design, programming, or other tech, you'll probably hit a few minor roadblocks as you start picking up Drupal. And if you aren't a techie, there'll be plenty to learn.

But contrary to things you may have heard, Drupal is getting easier to use all the time, and even the non-techie can create and manage a site with this powerful stuff. Here are some notes on what to expect, and ways to make progress faster, from a fellow user who's probably not far (if at all) beyond you on the learning scale.

What's Drupal and Drupal Development?

Drupal is a content management system (CMS) for entering and editing content, dynamically arranging data on the fly, and displaying it as pages. It's not for creating static web pages based on .html files. It's for putting content (articles, product info, whatever) into a database, and flexibly organizing that content into web pages however you like.

Some say Drupal isn't even a CMS; rather, it's so flexible that it's a content management framework, a toolbox from which you build your own CMS. Then again, others roll their eyes at that description. Leave that debate to the philosophers; either way, you can build neat stuff with Drupal Development.

Who uses it?

Organizations and sites including IBM, Google, Nike, BBC, CNN, Reuters, Popular Science, NASA, MTV, AOL, Nokia, Sun Microsystems, AT&T, Fedex, Forbes, Warner Bros, Universal Music, Sony Music, Virgin, Slate, Lucas Arts, MacWorld, Adobe, NATO, the UN, Novell, Harvard University, MIT, Stanford University, Yahoo!, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, The Onion, the French government, the Dutch government, the British government, the US White House, Linux Foundation, Java.net, Internet Systems Consortium, Electronic Arts, Metallica, Michael Jackson, Eric Clapton, and Drupalace.com. It's found particular favor among collaborative communities (such as political campaign sites), online newspapers and magazines, and educational institutions.