You often hear people say that the learning curve for Drupal is steep. They aren’t kidding – it is. I remember when I first started Drupaling, I had so many questions: How do I do this? How do I change that? What are Views? How the hell do I get images into my content? How do I theme? The Drupal documentation and community has come a long way in the few years since then, but even still, diving in to Drupal can be a bit daunting. In an effort to help remedy this, I’ve thrown together some quick-tips to steer all you beginners in the right direction.

Full disclaimer here: I love jQuery – I use it all the time. jQuery has made my life as a designer/developer so much better. I use is it on all of my sites – which means I use it within Drupal. When I first got started developing sites with Drupal a few years ago, I remember thinking, “How the hell do I add my own JavaScript?!”. Needless to say, I’ve learned a lot since then.

There are a number of different ways to include jQuery plugins or one-off scripts into your sites/pages. Here’s an overview of some of the ways to do it. The solution you use will likely depend on your workflow or comfort working within the Drupal theme system.