Think I’ve got my head around the idea of Views and then how to use them in Panels 2 to create the current front page layout (main recent posts and then sub-channels to provide headlines of other content)

It’s fairly easy once you know how, and of course once setup it doesn’t need changing. But getting there… ah! Taxonomies were easy, but then I’ve dealt with that as a concept for years. Views and Panels are Drupals ‘mindset’ and it takes a moment to grok it (as the techies say) There is a lot of information around concerning Drupal configuration but until you’ve got a bit of grok your floundering a bit - none of the terms make sense.

I feel its like this on lots of things, technical or not, its a general learning principle. Help and support is given by those who know and its very easy to forget the implicit knowledge held that a beginner doesn’t have. Making that knowledge explicit is a teachers artform. Concepts have to be introduced without reference to others and (for me anyways) plenty of try and see practicality. So Drupal learning path:

• create some content
• learn about taxonomy, add tags to stuff
• create views (which are lists of content that matches some rules eg all stuff tagged ‘drupal’)
• create panels (which are layouts of pages)
• stick views into panels to make specific bits of content appear on specific bits of the page
• voila!