Drupal – Page 2 – The Coding Pad

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:

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

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.

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Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide Book – Initial Impressions

I recently got a copy of the new Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide ebook by Dorien Herremans to review. I am currently working through it and will be putting up a comprehensive review soon, but I wanted to share my initial impressions with you, having read through the first few chapters and skimmed the rest of the book. Let me preface this all by saying that I am really really looking forward to working though this book.

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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.

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Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6 – Book Review

Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6 by David Mercer is what I believe is the ultimate beginner’s book for Drupal. While the other books that I’ve reviewed here focuses on how to build a particular type of website (Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions for a small business website and Drupal 6 Social Networking for social networking sites), Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6 looks at Drupal as a whole for any type of website.

This book walks you from the very beginning, introducing you to Drupal, how to set up a development environment and install Drupal, all the way to how to deploy your completed website. Early on in the book the author introduces you to the Drupal.org website and how to use it, which is a very useful section since the Drupal website is the ultimate Drupal resource and you need to be familiar with navigating and finding (and even sharing) information and resources.

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Building a Website with Drupal 6 – Part 8: Pathauto, Content and Content Types

Welcome to part 8 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. In the last tutorial we played we learned where to find and how to install contributed themes and modules. We downloaded and installed the Pathauto module and I promised we would configure it today.

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

In this installment, we’re going to get into the meat and bones of our website, adding content.

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