My second training course from video2brain is now available. It's a wicked humdinger, clocking in at nearly five and a half hours, and it's called Getting Started with Drupal. Many of the world's most visible websites run Drupal. It is tremendously powerful, useful, and quite pleasant to work with. It might make you taller and take a few strokes off your golf game, but since I don't play golf, I won't comment on that. I will say that now is a great time to learn to use it.

Drupal is meant for building totally custom websites, with fewer assumptions about what kind of site you want to build and how you want to present it, than other content management systems. It is possible, and expected, that a site built with Drupal with all kinds of customizations to make it exactly right for your purposes. This might be one reason that Drupal has a bit of a reputation as being unsuitable for beginners. I agree that there is a learning curve, but if you're looking to learn a piece of software that will help you build any kind of website imaginable, Drupal is a very solid choice. I use it in many of my own projects with (generally) no small amount of pleasure. If you've looked at Drupal and thought it might be intimidating, check out this course and you should find it's quite approachable. It's deep software, and there's always more to learn, but that, to me, is part of the fun.

We'll build a site for a fake band called Cash Bacon (a band I'm in thought about using this name for real — best or worst marketing choice ever?) using nothing but Drupal's out-of-the-box, core features. We walk through installation, configuration, creating and working with content, basic theme customization, installing modules, keeping Drupal up-to-date, and places to seek help. You'll learn real-world site building techniques, including how to use every Drupalero's best friend, drush. There are aspects of Drupal site building that I had to cut out to make this introduction watchable in a somewhat reasonable amount of time (we don't get into developing modules or serious theming), but I tried to present as much of Drupal as I could in a way that will last.

In the same way that my introductory WordPress course takes you from almost nothing to a complete website, we do that in the Drupal course. All you need is web hosting and a desire to learn. By the time you're finished, you will (I hope) feel comfortable working with Drupal and able to continue on your own.

Four sample videos of the 58 in the course are available on YouTube. This one is about running the Drupal installer:

Here are the others: Choosing a Theme, Other Popular Modules, and Getting Help on Drupal.org. If you're not interested in web development, they might make a fine sleep aid.

This course is exclusively available for download from my little store and the mothership at video2brain.com, for $40. I also have a bit of an incentive for you to order it sooner rather than later: from now until September 14, 2012, enter the coupon code GSWD20 at checkout from my store to get 20% off the course.

If you buy the course, or even if you just watch the sample videos, I'd love to hear about it. I have several more courses in the pipeline, on Drupal and WordPress and more. No one wants to make stuff that stinks (not most of the time anyway!), so if you have feedback, send it along.