Drupal 6 – The Coding Pad

Win a Copy of the Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide ebook – Blog Contest

I’m excited to announce a new blog contest at the Coding Pad today!! 🙂 In partnership with Dorien Herremans, author of the Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide ebook, we will be running a blog contest focused on building community websites with Drupal.

I’ve been building a series of Drupal beginner tutorials here, but I’m sure you’re itching to learn more, build more, and explore Drupal’s power past the basics. Well, here’s a suggestion for you – build a community website!! How? By getting and learning, and working along with an excellent book – Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide ebook!! 🙂

Up for grabs are three copies of this awesome ebook that walks you step by step through the process of building a Community Website using Drupal. I wrote my inital impressions about this book in a prior blog post (Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide Book – Initial Impressions) – and since then have continued to be impressed by the author’s approach and the content of the book.

How to Enter:

It’s real easy!

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Building a Website with Drupal 6 – Part 12: Formatting Content

Welcome to part 12 of our tutorial on building a website with Drupal 6. Previously we covered:

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Installing Drupal 6
Part 3: Configuring your Site
Part 4: Playing with Blocks
Part 5: Playing with Modules
Part 6: Playing with Themes
Part 7: Installing Modules and Themes
Part 8: Pathauto, Content, and Content Types
Part 9: Users, Roles, and Permissions
Part 1o: Reports – Keeping Track
Part 11: Managing Spam and Comments

As we go through this tutorials I am building a Drupal resource site called Learn Drupal. So far our website is shaping up really well, the basics are pretty much taken care of, and we’re now looking to build on content, and start adding on more functionality, depending on the purpose of your website.

In this installment, we’re going to look at how to make formatting your content easier for yourself and your users.

Continue reading “Building a Website with Drupal 6 – Part 12: Formatting Content”

Building a Website with Drupal 6 – Part 11: Managing Spam and Comments

Welcome to part 11 of our tutorial on building a website with Drupal 6. Previously we covered:

As we go through this tutorials I am building a Drupal resource site called Learn Drupal.

So far our website looks like this: (you can click on the images for a larger view)

As we’ve been building our website we’ve been aiming to have users and visitors interact with our website. One of the ways in which visitors interact with the Learn Drupal website is by leaving comments, and sometimes, spam. Today, we’re going to look at some ways of managing comments and spam on our website.

Continue reading “Building a Website with Drupal 6 – Part 11: Managing Spam and Comments”

Building a Website with Drupal 6 – Part 10: Reports – Keeping Track

Welcome to part 10 of our tutorial on building a website with Drupal 6. Previously we covered:

As we go through this tutorials I am building a Drupal resource site called Learn Drupal.

So far our website looks something like this: (you can click on the images for a larger view)

Our website is coming along great, we have some content, we have a contact form, we have a relatively unique look, things are looking good. But how do we know if we’re getting visitors? You’ll notice in my screenshot that I have a counter on each piece of content that tells me how many times the content has been viewed. This is made possible by the settings we chose when we enabled the Statistics module, and is visible to me as the administrator, and you should be able to see it on your website too. But what other specific data does the Statistics module log? This is part of what we’re going to briefly explore today.

Continue reading “Building a Website with Drupal 6 – Part 10: Reports – Keeping Track”

Building a Website with Drupal 6 – Part 9: Users, Roles, and Permissions

Welcome to part 9 of our tutorial on building a website with Drupal 6. Previously we covered:

As we go through this tutorials I am building a Drupal resource site called Learn Drupal.

So far our website looks something like this: (you can click on the images for a larger view)

In this post we’re going to start looking at the basics of the interaction part of our website. What do visitors to our website see when they land on the front page? What can they do with the content they see on our website? Do we want them to be able to interact with the website at all, or do we want them to come, see, read, and leave? Well, in the case of a business website that may be your intention. But in most cases, you want your users to interact with your website, to leave their thoughts on the content, maybe even to contribute content, to vote on polls, to comment on photos, maybe even to start and maintain their own page on your website. Well, it all starts with user management, which we’re going to talk about today.

Continue reading “Building a Website with Drupal 6 – Part 9: Users, Roles, and Permissions”