Preface

This is a work in progress. Some sections of this site are not yet populated with content.

Currently I am completing the "Reference | Creating starter websites | Basic Drupal Website v6.x for Windows" section. When that is completed I will provide a preconfigured "Basic Drupal Website v6.x for Windows" downloadable bundle.

Purpose

You are the enterprise website professional who is already familiar with Apache, PHP and MySQL, but needs to quickly get up to speed on the many rich features of the Drupal Content Management System.

There are so many choices. Where do you start? How do you sift through the thousands of Drupal modules. And how does your team deliver in weeks, not months? How do you provide an enterprise-level working Drupal website that you can be confident will scale with your customer's needs the first time?

DrupalWebsiteCookbook.com to the rescue!

In the Starter websites section you will find numerous preconfigured and ready to run Drupal website bundles for a wide variety of business needs. Apache, PHP and MySQL are already included and the best Drupal modules have already been included and configured to work together. All you have to do is load-and-learn. The goal of this website is to shave months off of your Drupal learning curve by giving you specialized Drupal site bundles that already work.

Roadmap

This website is laid out like a book with five sections:

1. Overview - introduction, conventions, included documentation and reader feedback

2. Jumpstart - what do you want to do?

3. Building your website  - design, implementation and support

4. Starter websites - ready-to-go website bundles

5. Reference

About the Author

I am happily employed by C.R. England Global Transportation, one of the 50 fastest growing and revenue-generating companies in the State of Utah. The fact that C.R. England Global Transportation is now in its 90th year, and being managed by a third generation with a fourth being prepared when appropriate, has been its biggest success. The Englands have been successful in keeping this a family business and treating everyone as if they were a part of the family. They treat me better than I could ask for, and I am not looking for any outside employment.

In June 2009, after an exhaustive in-house comparison of major web-based content management systems including the Java-based Alfresco and Magnolia, and the PHP-based Joomla, WordPress and Drupal solutions, we committed to converting our content-based Internet and Intranet websites to Drupal. Nothing else came close to Drupal's sheer power of available third-party functionality and ease-of-use, combined with a mature installed base of existing showcase sites.  The fact that Drupal is the product of a vibrant opensource community of contributors ranging from individuals to global corporations makes it even more compelling as a large enterprise CMS solution!

Along with the power of Drupal, when used in a large corporate enterprise like C.R. England Global Transportation, is a significant learning curve for those of us who are responsible for its initial implementation. The investment of millions of hours of manpower in the creation, thorough testing and ongoing maintenance of the over 4000 modules and other additions that the Drupal environment offers is equally mind-boggling.

Opensource is what it is because everyone who benefits also contributes back so that others can benefit too. Initially I started putting this information in my own professional knowledge base created, incidentally, with Drupal using the Books and GeSHi Filter modules. Later I decided to take the best from the Drupal portion of my professional knowledge base and place it here so that you can also benefit from it as well. Most of the work on this site was done after work, on weekends and into the wee hours of the morning. We all benefit by giving back to the Drupal pool of knowledge and resources. This website is my contribution. Unlike a printed book it offers a superior way to keep this information up-to-date.

Since my primary expertise is in 11 years of enterprise Java web application development, instead of contributing back PHP Drupal modules, I decided to contribute back with the information you find here, combined with ready-to-run Drupal bundles that should save you months of research. The real credit goes to the vast army of Drupal giants like Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, for his vision and continuing "guiding hand", and all those who have produced such an incredible library of plug-in modules -- for free. In providing these Drupal ready-to-run bundles I am just standing on the shoulders of these giants.

It is an honor to be a small part of Drupal's success story.

Gilbert Jorgensen
jorgbert (at) gilbertjorgensen (dot) com