Summary: Episode 174 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week Kevin Dees (@kevindees) interviews Ronnie Taylor (@rontec76) about the world of Drupal and how to make the most of what it has to offer. Listen in Your Browser Play this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below: Download this Episode You can download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link: SitePoint Podcast #174: Drupal with Ronnie Taylor (MP3, 46:22, 44.6MB) Subscribe to the Podcast The SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly. Episode Summary Kevin and Ronnie go through how Drupal is structured, and how that can suit different types of project, and how a user new to Drupal can into using it for the first time. They then cover some more advanced tools you can use with Drupal and how this can improve workflow. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1328644474660-10'); }); Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/174. Interview Transcript Kevin: All right. So I am here with Ronnie Taylor at CoWork Greenville and today we’re going to talk about this mysterious system called Drupal. But before we jump into Drupal, I’d like to introduce you to Ronnie. Ronnie is one of my friends here at CoWork Greenville, and we get to talk about code all the time. I was like, “Why don’t we just talk about this code stuff on the SitePoint podcast?” So here we are. Ronnie, tell me a little bit about yourself, how you got started in this web world. Ronnie: It’s sort of a common story. I started out doing other things and sort of evolved into doing web work full-time. I have an IT and engineering background and then worked in the newspaper world for a while. Starting learning web stuff on the side on my own and just it sort of evolved from there, started taking on customers and so eventually jumped out into the freelance world. I’ve been doing this for a while. I started full-time back in 2004 and I’ve gone through a couple iterations of business. So, that’s how I got started. Kevin: You did freelancing for a while, right? Now, you’re kind of migrating into different things? Ronnie: Yeah, I actually have just taken a full-time job with one of my clients. I’m doing a lot of Drupal stuff for them, but also expand into some Rails and some other stuff. But, yes, I’ve been doing freelance for quite a long time. Kevin: Very cool. So what made you pick Drupal as a platform? Tell us why we should consider that as a viable solution outside of something like, say WordPress, which is extremely popular, has a lot of plug-ins out there. Out there, there are many, many, many reasons to use WordPress and I think Drupal gets overlooked, but you’ve chosen Drupal and, I think, for some really good reasons. I like to use Drupal on specific projects. So what are the reasons that you use Drupal? What drew you to it? Ronnie: I would say that it’s – and then we’ll talk about some of these things later as well – but the modularity of it, which allows for a high level of customization even down into the core parts of Drupal. So, it allows it to be very flexible and almost function as a framework, whereas some other systems I’ve used, they’re inherently geared towards just being specific things and specific types of sites. So, it’s the flexibility is the short answer Kevin: Right. Ronnie: Then the community on top of that. There’s a huge number of modules and there’s a huge community that’s very friendly and willing to help out. Kevin: So, you’re mentioning this community that was online, a part of the reason why you picked Drupal. You picked Drupal starting out near its very beginning, [...]
