Understanding Drupal

Speaker: dinarcon

Session Description

Drupal is an extremely flexible system. To achieve this, various layers of abstractions are built into it. Many concepts were create to explain these abstractions. Unfortunately, they are not always intuitive for someone just starting with drupal. For example, the ubiquitous word 'node' does not represent a point in a network nor a server side programming language.

Have you ever asked yourself any of these questions?

What is a node?
What are entities?
What is a block and what can I do with it?
How are users and permissions managed?
What is a module and its purpose?
What is a theme and how can it change the look and feel of my website?
How can I create the navigation of my website?
I'm not a fisherman. Why do I need hooks?
Why is it that a kitten passes away, every time I make a quick fix in the downloaded code? How can I prevent that?

Drupal 8 has been released and it ships with lots of cool new features. As you might imagine, it brings new concepts and more questions for beginners. For example:

What is the difference between content and configuration entities?
What is the difference between state and configuration?

The Drupal community doesn't want new adopters and prospective contributors to go away for not understanding our parlance. Come to this session and figure out what Drupal is all about. Don't worry, it won't be a theoretical, boring talk. It will be a joyful conversation with lots of examples to help you understand drupal and why it is so powerful.

See you there! :D

This session has been presented in other Drupal events.

P.S.: The majority of the concepts that will be explained apply to Drupal 8 and previous versions. Those specific to Drupal 8 will be noted as such.

https://2016.midcamp.org/session/understanding-drupal

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