The Ultimate Drupal Guide, Part 1: Where to get Direct Help

In the past 6 months, I have dived deep into the world of Drupal and developing sites with it. I was introduced to Drupal 6 as a student assistant at school, where I watched countless Drupal screen casts, set up my own site, and tinkered for hours and hours. Now, after 6 months of site building, the release of Drupal 7, and interning this Summer (thank you LevelTen), I can confidently say that I know how to set up a Drupal site and have a good understanding of what the best modules are and how to use them. Although these are the very basics, I feel like I am capable of developing a quality site with dynamic features. I can now take a step back and ask myself, "what would have made it easier for you if you started today." Or, "what resources would you give a new, prospective Drupal developer?" These questions, accompanied by my amateur Drupal ninja status, have inspired me to help my fellow beginner developers by creating a blog series: Ultimate Drupal (7) Resource Guide. In this series, I will flexibly discuss several different resources that the Drupal community offers. Topics include training, videos, books, podcasts, case studies, and distributions, among other things. The last post will be a compilation of links listed in the series. Today's topic: Where to get direct help. I think that the hardest part for me, and other novice Drupalers out there, is two-fold, one being best practices. You can set up a photo gallery dozens of different ways in Drupal, but which is the best way for my site? Secondly, finding reliable and relevant resources to solve my problems. Don't get me wrong, the Drupal community is great and the answers are out there, it just takes some searching. If you have a problem, someone else has had the same one. When I first started, solving a problem was a matter of sifting through the Drupal.org forums search results or googling my problem to be linked elsewhere on the web for further research. Then it was time to implement, fail, tinker, repeat, until I had what I wanted. If this didn't work, it was time to reach out to the community. But the Drupal.org forums are not the only way to get direct help. Drupal.org also has an IRC channel where you can ask your questions to Drupal developers from all over the world. The IRC is broken down into channels too, there are channels for just about every discipline including theming, SEO, and e-commerce. There is even a channel to vent about Drupal, #drupal-vent. Try it out in your browser with freenode http://webchat.freenode.net. Channels: #drupal Two other good resources for direct help are http://drupal.stackexchange.com and http://www.reddit.com/r/drupal. The Drupal stack exchange page is a collaborative edited question and answer site for Drupal developers. It's very well organized and there over 2500 questions answered. The Drupal sub-reddit is also a collaborative question and answer site for the most part, with general Drupal discussions and media thrown in. Both offer a large, growing community of experienced Drupal developers, making them great alternative resources for asking questions. With all that said, I would still recommend checking Drupal.org for your answer first. If it's not there, ask your question on the Drupal.org forums. (http://drupal.org/forum). It is the most centralized resource of Drupal developers- the best of the best in the Drupal community. Once you have learned how to build something new or have fixed a problem, contribute! Frequent the sites I've listed above and help others- teaching others is a great way to teach yourself! Learn how to contribute with best practice on Drupal.org here: http://drupal.org/contribute/support Links: http://drupal.org/forum http://drupal.org/irc http://webchat.freenode.net (#drupal) http://drupal.stackexchange.com/ http://www.reddit.com/r/drupal http://drupal.org/contribute/support Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gaborhojtsy/348865199/