Getting Started with Drupal

Welcome to the first installment of a 2018 update to our "The Ultimate Guide to Drupal 8" blog series, fresh off the presses for Drupal 8.6.

Drupal 8 has a lot in store for you, whatever you do with Drupal. This series of blog posts will enumerate the major changes, features, and updates in Drupal 8 for service providers and end users, site builders, designers, theme- and front-end developers, and for module and back-end developers.

Out-of-the-Box Demonstration

As you're installing Drupal 8, one of the first things you'll notice is that it offers an option during installation to select a demo option for Umami Food Magazine.

While not intended as a starting point for new Drupal sites ("standard" is generally best for that), this option can be very useful the first time you install Drupal to get an idea of what it can do.

Quickstart Installation

If you are comfortable working from the command line, you can also install Drupal 8 from a single command, including a local web server and database:

php core/scripts/drupal install <profile_name> -- no-interaction

An exceedingly brief introduction to Drupal terminology and basic capabilities

As a magazine website, Umami is set up with some default content types — article, basic page, and recipe — which contain relevant fields for capturing structured data, such as cooking time (numeric), difficulty (list), image (file), and tags (reference).

Data within these fields are then exposed as views (essentially "smart" content listings); for example, a sidebar block of featured articles, or a gallery page of the most recent recipes on the site.

Wrapping up all of these capabilities is a nicely-designed theme (custom design) for the site to make it really look and feel like a real food magazine. Multiple user roles with sample users are available to produce the magazine. Authors can create draft articles and recipes, while editors can review, publish and archive them.

A number of modules are enabled to provide various capabilities (such as a WYSIWYG editor), and you can further extend Drupal by turning on others, or downloading additional modules from Drupal.org.

Drupal 8 User Guide

To learn more about getting started with Drupal, be sure to check out the Drupal 8 User Guide, maintained by Drupal's documentation team. It provides an excellent overview of Drupal 8 from a site builder perspective, introducing Drupal concepts with a project-based, step-by-step approach. It's available in several languages, and downloadable as a PDF for offline viewing, as well. Chapters have video commentary as well.

That's a Wrap

Join us for our next installment, when we'll be talking all about Drupal 8's content authoring experience.