Drupal Tutorials

This section of the site contains Drupal tutorials. When browsing the Drupal-specific areas of this site, look for the Drupal tutorials menu that appears on the left sidebar. The list of tutorials is also listed at the bottom of this post.

Drupal is a free open-source content management system (CMS) that is powered by PHP and MySQL. After much experimentation I believe that Drupal is the best open-source content management system available. WordPress is the only other open-source content management system that I use.

Why I prefer Drupal over WordPress

WordPress was designed for blogging. It can also be used as a lightweight content management system. For heavy-duty sites I recommend using Drupal instead of WordPress. Drupal has many advantages over WordPress like:

Drupal has much better control of URL structure than WordPress
Drupal is designed for community sites and has more functionality with user accounts and user-generated content than WordPress
I think that Drupal makes a better multi-user blogging site than WordPress (unless you are using WordPress MU)
Drupal Taxonomy is more flexible than WordPress categories
Drupal's custom content types (e.g., CCK module) and Views open up many possibilities for building complex Web sites
and much more...

Drupal's Learning Curve

Drupal does have a bit of a learning curve. I am focusing these tutorials on two aspects of Drupal: issues that beginners have trouble with, and Drupal SEO. Some of the tutorials here was originally written for Drupal 4.7, but they are generally updated for Drupal 5 and 6 as my time allows. If you have questions for me about what I've written, please post them in the comments or in our Webmaster Forum.