I recently heard someone on TV say, “I’m a woman of the tens .…” Ha, I had never thought about it but I guess what else would you call this decade?

I am starting off my third year of the tens with a bang, as the new web designer for Level Ten Interactive. As I settle in with my brand new colleagues in this brand new year, I’ve been reflecting on my goals for my client work at Level Ten. I’ve decided one of my top priorities is to make our clients’ sites look “of the tens.” But what does it mean to be “of the tens?”

I’ll let you in on a secret. Like many of you, I’m new to Drupal. Despite having a strong background in content management, Drupal is unexplored territory. I remember what it was like in the beginning as I learned to develop new sites. We all remember a point when we were baffled by basic applications like posting blogs, and terms like “CMS”, or “open source” seemed foreign.

Have you ever made a Drupal site where the design called for implementing one or more mega-menus? Have you spent countless hours downloading module after module and hacking your theme's template file to get the code to insert at just the right place?

LevelTen Interactive introduces: Menu Views

After being introduced to the concept of responsive web theming, I took to it like a duck in water. I was pleased with the well documented contributed Drupal base theme, Omega based on the 960.gs grid. This amazing framework provides a plethora amount of configurable options, scalability and an overall sense of structure. I will not be covering any technical space-talk or how to configure Omega in this blog. If you would like to learn more about Omega, please visit the following site for more information: http://omega.developmentgeeks.com.

Why do you want a website? Because everyone else has one? That's a really terrible reason. Websites are really tools to accomplish a goal. Too many companies set out to build a website without fully thinking this through.

Let me give you an example.

Have you ever needed to put Service links or ShareThis into block? How about AddToAny in a node link? Want to have different share buttons per content type? Want a simple way to add the latest widgets from Twitter, Facebook or Google to your site. Want to enable admins to customize widgets without having to dig into the API docs? It's time to start wrangling in all those widgets.

People love changing things around. Wouldn't it be nice if people could easily swap out images on their home page or even change the background of the theme. Granted, I usually advise against the latter scenario as many people think they know what looks good, but don't realize that their camping escapade isn't always enjoyable by all. However, it can be done! What I think is more important is that it can be done intuitively.

It is amazing in three short years how much more powerful and easy to use Drupal distributions have come. Three years ago I spent the holidays converting our base Drupal installation into a distribution. Friday, we launched the fourth generation of the OpenEnterprise distribution, built in Drupal 7 leveraging Apps. Distros have come a long way baby!

In Part 1 of my Learning Drupal blog series, I introduced some first steps to learning and understanding Drupal. In Parts 2 & 3 I plan to dig into training classes, official Drupal documentation and user forums, site recipes, blogs and blog aggregators, books, podcasts, videos, slide decks, distributions, Twitter, IRC, and more. But I thought I'd sneak in a Part 1.5 and show you a really great way to get paid to learn Drupal.

I'm sure most of you who are reading this are in love with Drupal and so am I. But I'm about to share with you one of the hard learned lessons about Drupal. That is, sometimes not doing it in Drupal is a better idea.