Beginning Drupal 8

Chapter 17
Putting It All Together
Reading this book has given you the foundation of knowledge on which to continue to build your Drupal
skills. If you are new to the concept of a web content management system, you may not be able to jump in
and build a highly complex site as your first endeavor with Drupal. But like all things in life, you have to start
somewhere, and you now have the tools and knowledge to begin your journey. For those of you who had
previous content management experience, hopefully the book helped to cast a light on how Drupal works so
you can correlate what you know from other CMS platforms with what Drupal provides.
Now What?
Learning anything new takes practice, and with practice comes comfort, and with comfort comes the ability to
do new and exciting things. Learning Drupal takes time, study, practice, and patience. One of the best ways to
learn Drupal is to find a real-world opportunity to build a website and do it in Drupal. Whether the site is for
your child’s sports team, your church, a community group, a nonprofit organization, or anything else under
the sun, having a project to focus on that you know will benefit a person or organization gives you incentive to
learn, which helps in the learning process. How else can you keep up-to-date with your Drupal knowledge?
Look At Other Drupal-Based Sites for Ideas
Although it’s hard to look at a site and immediately detect that it is a Drupal site, there is an excellent
resource that will help you find sites that were built on Drupal. Dries Buytaert, the creator of Drupal,
maintains a fairly up-to-date list of very high-profile websites that are built on Drupal. You can find that
list on his personal website at http://buytaert.net/tag/drupal-sites. Dries does an excellent job of
capturing a broad spectrum of sites from various industries and sites from all around the world. He updates
the list continually, so it is a good idea to bookmark that page and to visit it frequently.
By scanning through the list of sites that Dries has compiled (currently well over 100), you can quickly
get a sense for the types of sites that people have successfully built on Drupal. By looking at other sites, you
can get inspiration for design (the visual look of the site), layout (how the pages are structured), organization
(how content is displayed), and the features and functions that have been deployed. Looking at other sites is
a common starting point for many people who are embarking on a new Drupal project.
Keep Tabs on Drupal and Contributed Modules
One of the benefits of using Drupal is that it is a constantly evolving platform. As new concepts are defined
on the Web, Drupal is often one of the first content management systems to employ those capabilities.
Keeping up with the changes is relatively simple: just check www.drupal.org/project/project_module and
look at the latest modules and updates posted to the site. (See Figure 17-1.)
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