Nepalese Drupal Beginners Guide + 50 Tricks Not to Miss

Now there’s a headline you never thought you’d see. Young Innovations, a Drupal development firm from the mystical land of Nepal, has released a beginners guide, in English, for the Drupal open source web content management system. Drupal how to For Beginners was developed by Young Innovations in conjunction with SAP, and is freely available under a Creative Commons license.Running to 94 pages and with screenshots-aplenty, the guide is comprehensive. The scope is similarly broad - beginning with an explanation of what a CMS is (as if anybody knows anymore...), and continues through installation, management, customization, and adding modules. One small gripe — the sages behind this tome are rather more at home wrestling with LAMP configs and pimping add-on modules than with the deployment of English grammar. Witness this affront to Wordsworth and Byron:

"The primary target audience of this how-to or manual are people with some knowledge of web programming language and database more specifically people who know PHP and MySQL will be benefited to know and use such a world class product that also for free."

Tut tut. Let me get my red pen. But to be fair, we're not marking these guys on syntax and grammar. You just want to know whether this "how-to" is worth downloading as an aid to getting your Drupal website up and running. The answer is yes, and in fact it's quite a bit more. Young Innovations should have called this 'Goldilocks Teaches Drupal', because everything is just about right. Right length, right level of complexity, right amount of 'dumbing down' for less technical folk -- within their stated audience of semi-HTML proficient persons, right balance between explanation and overt instruction. Despite the aforementioned length, most of the bulk is taken up with screenshots and you can skim it in half an hour and still learn plenty. The primary function it performs, even more important to my mind than being an installation/beginners guide, is that it gives an excellent overview of exactly what Drupal is all about. And that, I'm sure you'll agree, is a worthwhile result. Download the guide as a PDF here, and if you want to have a look at Young Innovations' playground, visit them here. While you're at it, why not go here to have a look at Nepal's burgeoning Drupal community. Call it a cultural exchange. In related news, influential Drupal consulting firm, Lullabot, has released a podcast citing "50 Drupal Tips and Tricks". It's already garnered 400 Diggs in just a couple of weeks, so tips like "Turn any CCK type with an imagefield into a photocast with ConTemplate" are evidently not the gibberish it appears to this non-Drupalist. The cult of Lullabot has now racked up 50 such podcasts, and you can of course check them all out at lullabot.com. In related Drupal news, the latest (beta) version has just hit the street. See Drupal Drops 6.0 Beta 3; Sports OpenID and Fancy Installer for the details.