Being something of a bibliophile,
as I expect all librarians at heart are, instead of immediately finding and
installing Drupal like a promised myself I would do. I instead went out and
starting reading a book about it. There are many Drupal books out there,
however the one that I ended up using was The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7. If I
was going to invest the time into
learning this I wanted to make sure it would actually help me achieve my
goal. The best way to start that is by learning exactly what Drupal is, and if
this would help me with my target goals.
Drupal is a content management
system. Drupal is written in PHP and Javascript (using Jquery). Drupal uses
databases on the web servers (either, MariaDB, MySQL, or PostgreSQL). The point
of using Drupal instead of developing these things yourself from the ground up
is because Drupal is an open source system. It saves the web developer (me in
this case) from having to figure out the programming from the ground up. It
could also accelerate my learning curve. By using Drupal I can figure out which
pieces I need and why, and then go look at their core programming to learn
exactly how the PHP I desired works, instead of having to figure this out the
hard way.
Unlike other content management
systems such as Wordpress, which is very focused on blogs, Drupal is designed
to be highly diverse, extensible, and scalable. It is literally designed to be
able to handle all types of websites from e-merchants to (and this surprised
me) the White House website.
Drupal is an application framework.
This means that it is designed to be a platform for developing serious web
applications. It is meant to handle multiple APIs well. Since it is an
application framework it can be used as the basis for a variety of apps, from
smartphone to Facebook. It can also be found in non-CMS roles such as the front
end of Java-based apps or as the back end for AJAX or Flash. An example of this
that I found personally interesting was OpenScholar – a Drupal based website creation and hosting
program that was designed to allow Academic Institutions to host an unlimited
number of Academic websites. It allows professors and students to create those
websites with no knowledge of programming or HTML. This includes being able to
manage their own dynamic content, publications, events, blogs, classes, themes,
and even online collaborations.
Drupal supports RDF. I first came
across RDF when it was mentioned as an aside in my cataloging course, and then
more thoroughly in my metadata course. RDF is a very simple ‘triple’ framework,
where ‘thing A/has property/value” so one common triple would be “ebook 1/has
author/john smith”. RDF is a core component of the semantic web, the idea that
becomes embodied with interactive API frameworks such as Drupal which can use
these assigned properties to pull and interact with the data as the various API
interfaces, or programs talk to each other; speaking in either SOAP or REST,
the ‘languages’ that I discovered on Friday.
The final straw that convinced me
that Drupal is the key that I want to use to try and unlock my dream job was
the fact that one of the modules of Drupal (a Drupal module is a bit of
extensible code that has already been made and released to the open source
community that can add extra features or depth to your website) is an Apache
Solr search function module. Solr familiarity and working knowledge was
mentioned as a desirable quality on my dream job listing; and though I don’t
know much about it yet – this is the first real lead I have had! My plans for
tomorrow include: continue reading up on Drupal, try to design a wireframe for
my demo site, and try to start determining which modules and content I wish use
in my design.
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