Website Information Simplified - webbilia.com

Drupal provides a feature rich framework based on php scripts for building dynamic websites that can be run on a variety of platforms including Linux, Mac OS X, Windows or FreeBSD where Apache or IIS is setup and a compatible database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL is available. Once installed you have all the tools you’ll need on site accessed through any web browser. The content management system [CMS] has an extensive menu that allows you to control layout and a variety of data base driven content for web pages, blogs, forums and other publishing options. If you are only interested in blogging you may want to consider an alternative such as Blogger or WordPress. The appeal of Drupal is it’s versatility. It is one of the many open source projects found in fantastico that comes with cPanel hosting.

You can download Drupal at drupal.org and find detailed instructions on installation. If you are fortunate enough to have a hosting service with the complement of necessary features such as Gator Hosting your will be able to easily install Drupal by selecting it from the Fantastico set of scripts and wa’lah, you are ready to follow simple instructions for the initial setup at the welcome screen. Don’t get to anxious though as there are some elements that may be hard to change or have negative effects if you change your mind after adding significant content. But, you can go ahead and “create the first account” at this point. It will be given the ID of 1 with superuser administrator rights for the site. When you do so, Drupal will generate a password for this account, display it on your screen and send it to the email address you’ve stipulated. However, write it down in the event an error occurs.

Displaying Content in Drupal

After the installation is complete you will see a greeting on the front page:

“Welcome to your new Drupal-powered website. This message will guide you through your first step with Drupal, and will disappear once you have posted your first piece of content.”

Now you have to decide how you plan to get your message across and display content. By default Drupal uses two type of content, pages and stories, and displays a “teaser” of the content you create with the latest appearing at the top. Clicking the title or “read more” will display the content in full on a single page. You can determine if stories you crate are promoted to the from page or include them in a menu. Log in and proceed to Administer->Content managemet->Post settings to view these options. But, unless you know exactly how you want to layout your site you will want to take a look at other features and options.

Most important to any site hoping to be indexed by search bots is how they read your URLs. Dynamic content is going to include query characters instead of clean paths. Drupal has a feature that crates “clean urls” that you will want to enable. You can find at Administer->Site configuration->Clean URLs.

Creating You Layout

The most daunting aspect of creating a web presence with Drupal is deciding among the many choices. Whether you plan a brochure site or blog you still have to decide how you want to lay it out and what you want to include. You can browse through the administrative menu to decide what drupal features you want to implement and consider where to place them.

First, you can select among a basic Themes that come with Drupal, acquire a third party product widely available some of which appear on Drupal’s Themes Page or develop your own if you have the PHP / CSS skills. You can see what’s already available with your setup by navigating to Administer->Site building->Themes. Here, you can select among those that are installed, save your selection as the default theme and your presentation will reflect the changes.

Blocks are used in your layout to specify the location of content. Navigating to Administer->Site building->Blocks will display a page where you enable or alter the settings for the placement of individual blocks.

As you can see from the sample above, managing blocks is very straight forward and easy to manage.

Drupal Modules

Modules extend the core features of Drupal. Some of those installed are enabled with upon installation. Others have to be enabled from a list found at Administer->Site Building->Modules. They include Aggregator for setting up feeds, Blog for creating your blog, Blog API, Book for collaborating on a book project, Forum for setting up a forum, along with a host of others. There is a slew of third party modules a sampling of which can be found at Drupal’s Modules Page.

Most of the modules are fairly straight forward. But you should take advantage of the information at the Drupal site as you proceed with your site. Categories, for example, requires you have Taxonomies enabled before Categories will work. This may not be clear to you when you enable Catagoreis.

User Management

The User Management features of Drupal let you control user status and create policies for each status. When setting up a new user you need to make decisions as to what they will be allowed to do on the site. You can stipulate that only site administrators can create new user accounts or perhaps you want users to be able to set up account with administrator approval. Do you want to allow anyone to make a comment or only registered users? It is up to you to establish roles and permissions.

As you set up users, Drupal will send notice along with a user name and password for that user to the email address you assigned to that account.

Collaborative Publishing

Drupa’s Book module provides a versatile collaborative environment for publishing. Multiple users can be given access to the same publishing effort. They can edit content as well as rearrange pages in the document. Links for pages are automatically generated including Previous and Next along with an index page for the entire document. The module has to be enabled to be used. After it’s enabled the option to create a Book page will show up when you go to Create content.

Dupal provides a consistent reliable environment for multifaceted web publishing and collaboration on the Internet. The project has an extensive community that continually ads themes and modules encompassing everything from presentation to social bookmarking. The core code is updated regularly and has been for several years now. If you need more than just blogging Drupal is a reliable choice for your project. [wb_12]