Planning and Managing Drupal Projects

Chapter 3. Fleshing Things Out: Getting ready to prototype

This chapter deals with some practical issues of planning a Drupal implementation. In the first section, Working with Content, we’ll discuss why it’s vital to start working with real content right away in your Drupal site. In the second, Choosing Modules, we talk about the process of selecting the right modules for your site. There’s also an entirely non-comprehensive list of contributed modules that you might find Very Useful.

Working with content

In the Old Days™, building a promotional website was a fairly straightforward affair. You’d go through a discovery process, create a couple of wireframes—generally for the home page and 1-2 interior pages, then mock up and iterate designs. When those designs were approved by the client, you’d whip up a fancy template in HTML and start laying in the content and images.

Content, almost always, came later. You’d have a sense of the site map, and how it might evolve—you needed that for navigation—but the actual content was rarely something you saw in the early phases of developing wireframes. Generally, this wasn’t a problem; as you were coding the content by hand within the template, you could adjust the template relatively easily once you had content to work with.

With Drupal, as with many other content management systems, things aren’t that easy. Some elements will be familiar, especially if you’ve gotten used to systems like Wordpress. At the most basic ...