Tag: Drupal tutorial

Building a Website with Drupal 6 – Part 2: Installing Drupal 6

In the first part of this tutorial we introduced Drupal 6.  As part of your homework I asked that you install a webserver and get an FTP program so that you can install and run Drupal.  In this tutorial we’re going to go ahead and start the process of installing and configuring our Drupal install.

The website that I am building and showing you screenshots of is Learn Drupal, the Drupal resource site that I mentioned in the last post. I am building it online so that you can follow along or visit later and see how different things that we mention here were implemented.

1. Create your settings.php file.

You can do this step before or after you upload the Drupal install files onto your server.  Go into the sites/default folder.  Here you will find the file default.settings.php.  Copy and paste this file and rename the copy to settings.php.  So you should now have two files in the sites/default folder – settings.php and default.settings.php.  Drupal needs both of these files to exist for the install to be successful.

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Building a Website with Drupal 6 – Part 1: Introduction

drupal-logoAs promised, we are going to be moving on to Drupal 6, which is the current version of Drupal.  Instead of converting the Drupal Pad to version 6 as I had planned, I have decided to keep that website in Drupal 5 and create a whole new website in Drupal 6 for these series of tutorials because there is still sufficient interest in using Drupal 5.  I will tag the tutorials “Drupal 6” and “Drupal 5” so that you can choose which ones you’re interested in.

So let’s get right into it.  We are going to be working with Drupal 6.10, the current version as of this writing.  There are many ways to write a tutorial. I could introduce you to ALL the elements of a Drupal site and explain them all in theory, but then you’d probably get bored and maybe feel overwhelmed. Instead, I will introduce them as we need them so that you can know what they are as well as see them in action.  For example I will introduce the concept of modules when we start enabling modules, themes when we start enabling themes, blocks as we use them, and so on.

What are we going to build?

Through this series of tutorials we will be creating a Drupal Resource Site.  We’re going to create a place on the web where we can add tutorials, news about Drupal, articles, and so on.  We may at a future date include other features such as a user forum and more.

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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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