Drupal Support – IRC Channels

With all open source software there tends to be a community of developers whose passion is to keep the project alive. With Drupal this community can be accessed in a variety of ways. One of the best ways that I have encountered is that of the IRC support channels. The benefit of using the IRC channels is that support for issues encountered during the installation and configuration stages of the site, but it gives an opportunity to become part of the community of users who use Drupal on a daily basis.

There are many support channels that can be joined, although there are some vital ones that would be most beneficial as most of the community sit within and actively participate in these channels. These channels include:

• #drupal – General talk about the Drupal community, patches that need reviewing, themes that need altering and modules that need creating. This also serves as a good place to talk about future releases of Drupal.
• #drupal-contribute – This channel is for those wishing to get further involved into the community. Tasks discussed in this channel include documentation, module and theme development, promotion of Drupal and the overall Drupal.org infrastructure.
• #drupal-support – This channel is for support questions. If an issue arises during the configuration of a site, this is the place to ask it. You will usually get a solution to your issue as soon as someone is available.

It is incredibly easy to join one of these channels. Software such as Pidgin or Miranda have this functionality built in. Further information about the Drupal support channels and a list of channels that are currently used visit the following link – www.drupal.org/irc.

There is also a very small but dedicated Drupal community located within New Zealand. To join this channel enter #drupal-nz as the channel name, and it will automatically redirect you to the channel.  The community within New Zealand is currently very small with around 300+ developers, but will continue to grow as Drupal becomes more popular as a content management system.

Drupal as a blogging platform

With Drupal being highly configurable and scalable, setting up a blog and posting to that blog is very easy to do. By default, the blog module is included and distributed with the latest release of Drupal core. To take advantage of this functionality, all a user needs to do is to download the latest version of core and install it on a web server.

Once Drupal has been installed, a user would need to go to Administer / Modules and then select the blog module and click Save. The page will reload and display the message “Saved Changes” and this means that the module has been installed and is ready to go.

In order to create a blog post in Drupal, follow the following steps

1. Click on Administer / Content

2. Select Create Content

3. Select Blog Entry

4. Enter the title and text that you want to be included within your post.

5. Alter the path settings (customer URL – this is optional).

6. Click Save. Your blog post will now be displayed on the site.

Drupal offers the same blogging functionality as other software available (e.g. WordPress, Blogspot) including most recent posting blocks, categories, tagging and comments. The difference is that with Drupal, every user on your site has the ability to make a blog post which in turn means that there is the functionality available to have multiple blogs contained within the one site.

In conclusion, in deciding on which platform to use, I would definitely recommend looking at the overall requirements of the site and the technical ability of its users. If the site is to have multiple blogs and other functionality, then Drupal is the way to go. If the system is to only have one blog at most then blogging software such as WordPress and Blogspot is fine for this.