(no subject)

[owlectomy]

In every endeavor, you get the first flush of enthusiasm, and then the entirely-too-high ambitions, and then you run into the first thing you don't know how to do, and every attempt to solve the problem just further reveals the limitations of what you know how to do, and then you keep putting in new keywords into search engines to bang at this one little thing that won't come out the way you want it, and you get stuck in a trough of despair because to make any real progress would involve going back and trying to get a better ground-level understanding of things, and then you give up and decide you aren't going to learn Drupal after all.

Well, I'm going to go back and try things again, but it'll have to wait till I pull back from the whole trough-of-despair thing.

I'm also in the three months of the year when I can't use my desktop because my living room isn't air-conditioned, so that doesn't help.

I would really like to be a good enough just-for-myself/just-for-fun web designer that I can hack together something simple that looks good, without having to rely entirely on other people's themes and code. But I suspect it's like writing, where there are absolutely no shortcuts to good taste and trial-and-error successive approximations toward something that works.

Comments

[j00j]

Drupal is a beast to learn. The diagram in this is kind of not an exaggeration. http://sixrevisions.com/web-development/drupal-learning-curve/
It doesn't mean you should give up, and it does mean it's legit hard.

I learned what I know on work's dime, and it took a combination of playing around, courses offered by a local development firm, and working to develop our CMS with said firm. It's taking the development firm plus several in-house staff to build, maintain, and migrate content into the thing. We could do it with fewer people if we'd done something more prefab, but it would still take multiple people with very specific skills. For context, I mostly do project management and user support, but I can also create views and content types. Themeing and module development I don't know much about because we've got other people who can do it much better.

I think a reasonable Drupal skillset for a librarian would be a) definitely adding content to a pre-existing CMS b) perHAPS developing new views or content types if the CMS isn't complete, or if they want new things to be added. c) If they're not already on Drupal and want to be, involving librarians in planning the CMS for someone else to develop could be good. I think librarians with good technology skills are well-positioned to understand Drupal's goofy nature and make good choices about how to structure content and create taxonomies, etc. if needed. But ok, I'm biased, because I'm a library school grad who wound up in IT.

That being said, there may be libraries writing unrealistic job ads. I've seen some that expect you to be a systems librarian, a web developer, an instructional designer, and about 3 other jobs all in one.

[owlectomy]

Thank you, that is helpful! I think I installed a distribution that really had way too much stuff in it and was totally unsuited for a beginner; now that I've gone back to the default distribution, and a very simple theme, I'm back to "Oh, this is like Wordpress, just with a whole bunch more stuff in it" -- which seems like a good base from which I can tackle the harder stuff.