I have a series of database-driven websites that I’m thinking of incorporating into a CMS. It doesn’t look like WordPress will work, so I’m thinking of Drupal. I’d like to hire a developer to install and configure Drupal - locally and online - and set up a multi-site platform with a few working pages. I want to take notes during the process, so I know what’s going on, and I’ll probably have more questions. In short, I’d like to get my websites up and running in Drupal, and I’d like to have enough training to be able to take it from there.
Is that something that could be done in a couple hours?
If I do it now, will I likely run into trouble when Drupal 8 is released, or do you think it will be a simple upgrade? I probably wouldn’t publish anything online until Drupal 8 is out because I want to convert my sites to HTML 5, with responsive page design for mobile devices.
I also need to figure out the best way to install Drupal. I finally got it installed after installing Virtual Box > Drupal Pro. However, it looks like Virtual Box alone is going to be a learning curve, and I’m not sure if I want Drupal “separated” from my other projects. For example, I might want to try to connect to the database on my Mac.
Well, you should be able to get your multi-site installed and ready to start work in a couple of hours. It’s always the 80/20 rule where it takes 20% of the time to get set up and 80% to deal with all the details.
I would recommend looking for a Drupal meetup or Drupal group in your local area. Usually they have discussions about a particular topic but at the beginning there are introductions at which point you could introduce yourself and let them know you’re looking for a multi-site developer to work with you freelance to get up and going.
Well Drupal 8 is quite a different animal than any of the earlier Drupals. In most ways it will be a huge improvement but since the API has made some massive changes it will take devs a little while to catch up. As soon as Drupal 8 is released, if possible, I’ll be developing all new work in it. There’s no reason to languish in D7 if D8 is ready because eventually all Drupal sites must move forward. The only caveat will be that the modules and plugins I need must be ready too. I think for many websites on Drupal 8, because it does so much right out of the box, we will rely less on additional modules except when adding specific features like Geocoding/GMaps, eCommerce, heavy duty CRMs like CiviCRM or Salesforce, Moodle integration and that sort of thing.
That said, I think Drupal 7 will be relevant for about another 3 years before it is completely abandoned. I still see lots of Drupal 6 sites around and Drupal 7 was released 3 years ago. If you’re interested in Drupal 8 you might want to look at the alphas of Drupal 8 and ignore Drupal 7 for the most part. I hope to see the first beta of D8 soon and maybe we’ll see it released by June, 2014 (I hope).
I think bitnami will be the cleanest way to get up and running locally but for working on a remote test environment, I’d recommend getting a cheap shared hosting account at somewhere like Site5. You can get relatively inexpensive accounts with them that will allow for creating as many subdomains as you like for installing various test sites. ie: site1.example.com, site2.example.com, site303.example.com, etc… I’ve got many test sites set up that way.
One of the reasons I want to switch to a CMS is that I want to upgrade to OOP, so I was stunned when the video revealed that Drupal doesn’t use OOP! I was about to slam the door on Drupal when the video revealed that Drupal 8 will incorporate OOP, along with HTML 5 and responsive web design, two other things I want to upgrade to.
Oh yeah. It’s a weird time in the Drupal-sphere because this upgrade to Drupal 8 is such a huge shift from the old function based API to full on MV and OOP.
I’m excited about it. We should really be able to keep the module code clean. I’ve been experimenting with it on a Drupal 8 alpha test site. The new API is very similar to any MVC/OOP framework. Everything has a place and we can kiss goodbye the convoluted 100+ line module functions which are replaced by short statements and a standardized structure. Pretty cool stuff!
Drupal 7 and earlier did have a few objects you could play with. The node (any page of content) was an object you could access and do things with, the user was an object as well, and the backbone of any Drupal site which is the Views module was all OOP. What was missing was an OOP API so in your custom modules you could create objects and manipulate them in code but most of what you were doing was working with functions. Mind you, you could access your node, user or view objects from within your module code it just wasn’t anything as organized as what you’ll find with typical MVC frameworks.
Once you get things going with your LAMP stack or MAMP stack grab an alpha of D8 and get tinkering. You’ll need PHP5.4.x as a minimum.