So you’ve heard about Drupal and understand the basics, but you may still have more in depth questions. There are ample places you can learn more about Drupal, including books, courses, websites and even online chat. Below is a list of various resources that you can check out.

Books

There are many books out there that cover Drupal as a whole or specific aspects of it. 2008 is definitely the year of the Drupal book!

Some of the titles you may encounter include Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, and Community Websites by David Mercer and Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress by Robert T. Douglass, Mike Little, and Jared W. Smith. While these books were once very useful and popular, they are pretty outdated at this point and we wouldn’t recommend them.

There is also Pro Drupal Development by John VanDyk and Matt Westgate. This book is current and an excellent resource, it is much more programmer-focused and steers you towards writing your own modules. Buy it for your developers ;)

For beginners, there is Drupal 5 Themes by Ric Shreves. This book is new and a perfect introduction to theming with Drupal 5. It does require knowledge of CSS and HTML, along with a dose of creativity in order to get full use of the potential of the book. However, as an introduction to themes and Drupal basics, it is an excellent read.

Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6 by David Mercer is the newest book coming out from Packt Publishing and is a follow-up to Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites. This book is the perfect introduction to building a site with Drupal. It will lead you from initial planning of a site right through to the launching of your site. It’s full of helpful advice to less technical site implementers. There will be other books coming out within the next year too, aimed at different audiences.

So far there are also plans for upcoming books on:

• Drupal Ecommerce
• Drupal Site Recipes
• Pro Drupal Development, updated for Drupal 6
• Learning Drupal module development

Schools

While there are some schools that may teach general courses in regards to CMSes, few of these will cover Drupal specifically. This doesn’t mean there aren’t any, however, finding a class specifically catered towards Drupal is unlikely. Check your local schools for any courses on content management systems or dynamic web sites, or even online journalism (Drupal is popular for news websites and this is sometimes taught in the curriculum).

DrupalCon

DrupalCon.org is the best place to keep on top of the planning and scheduling of major Drupal conferences around the world. DrupalCon is the world-wide meet up for Drupal programmers and users alike. Hundreds of people from all over the world get together to learn more about Drupal, as well as connect with people who may be able to assist in their own websites. There are usually two per year, one in North America and one in Europe.

Local meet-ups

Traveling about the world to attend conferences isn’t always a possibility for everyone. However, all over the world there are also smaller meet-ups and user groups which are an excellent way of networking and discussing with local Drupal users. Searching on Google for your location and “drupal” is the best way to find these, or look for your location’s group on groups.drupal.org. Most meet ups of this size are free and less scary than bigger conventions can be. They vary from casual, social get togethers, to multi-day training. These are great for new users to Drupal!

Lullabot Workshops and Seminars

Lullabot is a company that has pretty much cornered the market on workshops and seminars. They are real Drupal experts and major contributors to the Drupal community who teach to both beginners and more advanced users. Their hands-on workshops are usually around 50 people, and range from one day to a week long. They run from hundreds of dollars to $1500+, but if you’re serious about learning and benefit from face-to-face training, this is the way to do it.

Web Resources

While there are many books and seminars one could attend, it’s not required you spend anything in order to find out more about Drupal. All you need is your internet connection! Some are better resources than others, but you’ll find everything from quick lists of tips to full video training online.

Drupal.org

Drupal.org is the heart and soul of Drupal. This site (http://drupal.org/) is the central place for all things Drupal and is the best place for an official answer, and the only place you should be downloading modules or Drupal itself from. Many Drupal users from all skill levels post on this website to learn, as well as help others with their Drupal experiences.

There are two excellent places to check out on the drupal.org website. There’s the Handbooks - http://drupal.org/handbooks which gives you everything from beginners and getting started with Drupal, straight through advanced development for Drupal. However, this isn’t the only place to learn more. There is also the drupal.org forum - http://drupal.org/forum which is where you can peruse various categories to learn more about the program. Search, search, search! Try Drupal’s advanced search (http://drupal.org/search) and you can limit your query to searching modules, forums, etc.

People on drupal.org are generally very helpful, friendly, and fun, especially if you provide a detailed description of your issue and are patient (and have searched thoroughly first).

Groups.drupal.org

Drupal’s Groups are an offshoot of the Drupal community where people gather around more specific areas, either geographically or topically. You’ll find working groups for people creating social networking sites, or non-profits, or designers. These are a great place if you are looking to integrate yourself with a group of like-minded people trying to accomplish similar goals with Drupal.

drupaldojo.com

Another excellent website for everything Drupal is drupaldojo.com. This is an incredible effort to have regular sessions of online video training on Drupal topics. Even if you can’t attend the meetings when they are scheduled, Drupaldojo.com always records and then archives their meetings for later reference.

YouTube

Drupallerslove creating screencasts. These are videos where the creator actually records his/her screen and voice while walking you through a particular tutorial. Best place to find these? YouTube. Often there will be a higher quality version of the video available elsewhere too, but YouTube is the best starting point to find Drupal-specific tutorials and be able to see ranking and comments on the quality of the video.

Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website. Much like YouTube, it’s a gold mine of excellent Drupal links. Look for recent links that have been saved by many other people, or search for specific tags. For example, here are the top tagged links for “drupal ecommerce”: http://del.icio.us/search/?fr=del_icio_us&p=drupal+ecommerce&type=all

IRC

If you aren’t familiar with IRC, just think online chat. IRC requires you to use a software application (“client”) to connect to the server. Here’s an overview of how to do this (http://groups.drupal.org/node/2326). From there, several different chat rooms exist for discussing Drupal. This page (http://drupal.org/node/108355) best explains the difference between the channels and also explains some general etiquette and procedures.

There are many, many places that can help you learn more about Drupal. Some people will gravitate more towards one form or another, but it’s good to know the wide range of resources available for learning more.

Giving back

Remember to post your solution when you find an answer to your question, so the next person coming along can find it! You may still feel like a “newbie”, but if you’ve successfully done anything with Drupal then you’re already able to help out!