What even is "Site Building"?
At DrupalDownunder some years back, the wonderful Erica Bramham named her talk "All node, no code". Nodes were the fundamental building blocks in Drupal, they were like single drops of content. These days though, it's all about entities.
But hang on a minute, I'm using lots of buzz words, and worse, I'm using words that mean different things in different contexts. Jargon is one of the first hurdles you need to jump to understand the diverse worlds of the web. People who grow up multi-lingual learn that the meanings of words is somewhat arbitrary. They learn the same thing has different names. This is true for the web too. So the first thing to know about Site Building, is it means different things to different people.
To me, it means being able to build a website with out knowing how to code. I also believe it means I can build a website without having to set up my own development environment. I know people who vehemently disagree with me about this. But that's ok. This is my blog, and these are my rules.
So - this is a post about site building, using SimplyTest.Me and Drupal 8 out of the box.
1. Go to https://simplytest.me
2. Type Drupal Core in the search field, and select "Drupal core" from the list
3. Choose the latest development branch, right at the bottom of the list.
For me, right now, that's 8.6.x, and here's a screenshot of what that looks like.
4. Click "Launch sandbox".
Now wait.
In a few moments, you should see a fresh shiny Drupal 8 site, ready for you to explore.
For me today, it looks like this.
In the top right of the window, you should see a "Log in" link.
Click that, and enter admin/admin to login.
You're now ready to practice some site building!
First, you'll need to create some content to play with. Here's a short screencast that shows you how to login, add an article, and change the title using Quick Edit.
A guide to what's next
Follow the Drupal User guide to start building your site!
If you want to start at the beginning, you'll get a great overview of Drupal, and some important info on how to plan your site. But if you want to roll up your sleeves and get building, you can skip the chapter on site installation and jump straight to chapter 4, and dive into basic site configuration.
Experiment
You have 24 hours to experiment with the simplytest.me sandbox - after that it disappears.
Get in touch
If you want something more permanent, you might want to "try drupal" or contact us at catalyst-au.net to discuss our Drupal services.
