Drupal 5 – The Coding Pad

Building a Website with Drupal for Newbies – Adding Content

This is the sixth segment in my series of tutorials on building a Drupal website from scratch. I have been working on a lot of stuff and sort of drifted away from working on these tutorials, but I’m back to finish this up. This definitely won’t be the very last Drupal tutorial I ever do. I anticipate that you’ll be seeing a lot more Drupal related stuff at the Coding Pad, but this will wrap up the beginner basic stuff on getting the website completed.

OK,so far we’ve Introduced Drupal, learned how to install Drupal, we then set up and configured a Drupal site, and we went over how to build the Drupal site with blocks, menus, and modules. Finally, in our last tutorial, we talked about content. Recall that I have been working on a website concurrently with this tutorial: The Drupal Pad, and everything in these tutorials is implemented on that site.

So in the last tutorial we looked at the options under creating content,and we discussed the various default content types. So why don’t we go ahead and start fleshing out our website. Recall I said that we would start out by installing the Pathauto module so we would get our urls looking good from the start? I’ve decided to make that the topic of a different Drupal tutorial so as not to get things too complicated. Let’s just go into content for now and we’ll look at Pathauto in the next Drupal tutorial.

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Building a Website with Drupal for Newbies – About Content

This is the fifth segment in a series of posts on how to build a Drupal website from scratch. In the time since I wrote the last Drupal post, I have been learning more and delving deeper into the power and beauty of Drupal, and will be sharing a lot more in future posts, but these next two posts will wrap up the basics of building a Drupal website.

If you’ve been following this series, we have Introduced Drupal, learned how to install Drupal, we then set up and configured a Drupal site, and finally we went over how to build the Drupal site with blocks, menus, and modules. The site that I have been working on concurrently with this tutorial is The Drupal Pad, and everything in these tutorials is implemented on that site.

In this final section, we’re going to look at adding content to our site. We have a pretty basic website at this point, with a basic front page but not much else.

Drupal comes with some inbuilt content “types”, with the ability to create more. This ability to create and custom design your own content types is one of the things that makes Drupal a really powerful CMS, and we will go more into detail on this later. The two main content types built into Drupal are “Story” and “Page”.

By definition, Stories are articles in their simplest form: they have a title, a teaser and a body, but can be extended by other modules. The teaser is part of the body too. Stories may be used as a personal blog or for news articles. So you could use the story type to create news articles, blog post type of entries (if you don’t want to enable the blog module), articles, etc. On the other hand, a page is useful if you want to add a static page, like a contact page or an about page. I find myself using pages for things such as Site Disclaimers, Terms of Use, etc.

If you enabled the blog module or the poll module, then you’ll have extra content types, the Poll, and the Blog Entry.

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Building a Website with Drupal for Newbies – Building Your Site

This is the fourth in a series of posts on how to build a Drupal website from scratch. My apologies for the delay in getting this installment out, a lot has been happening on the home and work front that sort of slowed me down, but here we are.

In the first segment we introduced Drupal, and went over what we would need to work with Drupal. In the second part, we went over how to install Drupal, and finally, in the third section we set up the Drupal site, changed configurations, and did some other cool stuff. If you have followed the tutorials this far, you should have your website all set up, with your desired settings and names, headers, logos, etc in place. As you know, I am creating a website in tandem with this tutorial, and everything that I do on that site I will describe here in this series and also in future Drupal related posts. The website is http://drupalpad.maryspad.com, and you can check it out to see how far things have progressed and compare it to your site.

Now that you have your site configured, and all the basics in place, the next step is to start building your site. At this stage, our site is still very basic looking, with the Drupal front page introducing the site. For now, let’s leave that as it is. Soon I will show you how to put something else there when we delve into content creation and content management. For now, let’s add some important components.

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Building a Website with Drupal for Newbies – Installing Drupal

There are many resources out there on how to install Drupal, so I am going to go over this in brief in this post.

If your webhost provides you with control panel that has a script installer, check if Drupal is listed. An example of a script installer is Fantastico, which comes with cPanel. Using a script installer makes the process pretty painless. Make sure though that you have the latest version of any scripts you may install using a script installer such as Fantastico. Otherwise, you may want to visit the homepage and download the updates.

In our case, we want to install Drupal 5.7. Even though there’s a new version out (6.0), as of this posting a lot of the modules have not yet been updated to work with 6.0. So we’ll go with 5.7.

If you don’t have a script installer like Fantastico, or you just want to do the install manually, the process is a little lengthier but not too complicated. There are install directions at Drupal webisite, but I’ll break them down here for you:

1. Create a database and user, and assign the user to that database. Make note of the database name and username and password as you’ll need them.
2. Extract the drupal archive that you downloaded into a folder on your hard drive.
3. Using your ftp program, upload the files in this folder into your domain folder where you wish to install Drupal.
4. In your browser, type the name of your website where your drupal folder is sitting, and you will be prompted to enter your database information:

5. Enter the database configuration information from step 1, and then click on “Save Configuration.” If all is well, you will see this screen.

6. After this you will need to create a user account for yourself. This very first account that you create is designated by Drupal as the admin account and is a superuser account.

Your website is now installed and you’re ready to set it up, which we will cover in the next tutorial.

You can find more detailed installation instructions at the Drupal website (http://drupal.org/getting-started/5/install). If you have any problems doing this install you can post them here and we will discuss them, or you can also check the Drupal forums to see if there is a solution there.

In the next installment, we will walk through the process of setting up your new website.