NEW to drupal...I have a question or two.

Question

Im sort of new to this web developer thing (I really enjoy it!). I always want to give clients the option to edit their content with the whole login system setup...I've been hearing/reading about Drupal and it seems that this is my best option to offer content management, increase productivity, stable code, and uh increase productivity. :-)

• Question: Why are the pages accessed by "nodes" (Ex. /node?=1)? What happened to the traditional index.php homepages and being able to name your pages. I recently downloaded Drupal and started running it on my local server, but it was kind of confusing.

• Question: I have some existing projects the I want to base off
  Drupal (integrate/migrate/whatever). Is it possible to do this? If so how can I do this?

• Question: What tips can I use in production to increase productivity
  and simulate the sort of normal way
  of developing?

• Question: Can I develop multiple sites under 1 Drupal install or do I have to create multiple Drupal
  installs for each new project/site?
  If so how?

Sorry for the 21 questions, some of the help documents from Drupal are confusing. I would appreciate the help.

Answer 1

Happy that you're using Drupal. Its a CMS with a slightly sharp learning curve. I would recommend that you pickup a book or two (from Oreilly or Packtpub) about Drupal. Asking such general questions on Stack Overflow will not help you so much.

1. You're talking about Pretty URLs. You can enable them by using the Pathauto module. It will allow your pages to be named automatically. If you want to just explicitly name your page then you use the Path module

2. Yes, Drupal provides ability to migrate content from other CMSes. It also has some sophisticated modules to import data like node import (http://drupal.org/project/node_import) from CSV (Comma separated files)

3. This is the topic of a book or many chapters thereof :-). In general I would recommend that you pick up a basics book, they will teach you about best practices. Learn more best practices as you go along. Don't fall into the trap of premature optimzation.

4. You definitely can use multiple Drupal sites from one codebase. See http://drupal.org/getting-started/6/install/multi-site

Get a book. Thats best the way to learn Drupal.

Answer 2

Specifically, try this book - Using Drupal. It's the best first Drupal book.