Product: Understanding Drupal
Rating: 4.0
Title is apt: good overview of Drupal
Just a warning: I've met the people in this video at Drupalcon 2009 in DC and heard some of them speak on Drupal topics. They were very nice and smart. They made me feel dumb since they are drupal community developers at the bleeding edge. Anyway, that's my caveat and bias. I bought the video there, not really for myself because I know a bit about drupal, but rather for people at work, as a part of my sales pitch for Drupal to the management at my workplace as 'the future of our client websites'.The video did a good job of captivating my attention and providing an overview of what Drupal is, why it's better than making websites the old fashioned dumbdumb way (which is basically making templates in Dreamweaver and updating content manually).Well, that's sufficient for small business and mom and pop sites, if you expect to build compelling modern sites (by my definition, any site having a user-login system for more than just an email list), it becomes quickly unmanageable for a small team to make anything more than that. That's why Drupal is great. But what is it?This video explains all the parts of Drupal and provides a very good overview into the architecture of Drupal, without getting overly technical. They do not show code per se, but it does cover the concept of the node, modules, programmatic hooks and the templating system as well as the lamp (linuxapachemysqlphp) environment in which Drupal runs, optimally. To my surprise it even mentions cron, which can be a big 'gotcha' if you are not replacing it with something else when trying to run Drupal in windows.My only criticism is that the production quality was a bit low it seemed because the colors were kinda washed out on the dvd, still the audio quality was clear and the interview technique /documentary style was effective in discussing the topics covered.