Drupal 8 is a very powerful content management system (CMS). In fact, you can basically create web applications through the graphical user interface (GUI). But it's not an easy system to get your head around.
This book is meant to help you. It walks you through how to build a demo site, showing you how to do everything step-by-step.
We have a copy of the demo site available at the bottom of this page. You can install it, and use it to learn more about Drupal 8.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Install Drupal 8
- Tour
- Basic Pages
- Blocks
- Taxonomy
- Content Types
- Views
- Exposed Filters
- Pathauto
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Lightbox
- Themes
- Users
- Updates
- Drush
- Conclusion
Introduction
Drupal 8 is the latest version of the Drupal content management system (CMS). Why should you use Drupal instead of Wordpress or Joomla? I'm not saying you should. Wordpress and Joomla are great systems in their own right.
So why use Drupal? I think you should use Drupal if you have a site in mind that's more than just another blog or small business "brochure" site.
In my opinion, Drupal is closer to a web application framework than a content management system. Instead of programming your web application in a PHP framework or another web application language, you use Drupal's powerful graphical user interface (GUI).
For instance, you can use Drupal's content types to design specific types of content, and then use its Views module to pull this data out of the database and display it in various ways. It's hard to this in most content management systems without programming or using specific modules. With Drupal, you can do all this using just the basic system.
Unfortunately, Drupal can be confusing. It has a very steep learning curve. But we're going to help you by sharing some well earned shortcuts. In this book, we're going to walk you through creating a demo Drupal site. This demo site will be a real estate listing site. We'll show you how to create everything from start to finish.
We have a completed version of the demo site on our website. You can download the database and files at our website: https://www.webapppath.com. We have installation instructions available. Feel free to install it and play around with it.
We also have a Drupal tutorials website at www.drupaltutorialsonline.com. We post new tutorials there at least a couple times a month. We also have a Twitter account at https://twitter.com/viadrupal. Follow us, and we'll let you know when we post new tutorials. (Note: this website and Twitter account no longer exist.)