Beginner's guide to drupal

Website for Startups

The Drupal project was started in 2000 by a student in the Netherlands named Dries Buytaert. The code was originally designed for a site called Drop.org. In 2001 the source code for this project was released as Drupal. More information on Drupal history is available at http://drupal.org/node/769 .

Community Web Site
Weblog
Forums
Social Network Site
Wiki/Knowledge Base
Business Web Application

PHP
Apache/IIS
AppServ is recommended for Windows
Lighttpd works as well
• MySQL/PostgreSQL
Oracle support is coming
IBM is working on DB2 support

Most basic CMS features are included
Highly Customizable
Plenty of Modules
Good Architecture and API
Good Documentation
Performance
Good Community

Learning Curve
PHP knowledge needed
few Themes
Lack of Commercial Support
High reliability on Community support

And many others like Playstation, Ubuntu, Green peace,

Download Latest Drupal release from www.drupal.org .
Upload the file on www folder of your webserver.
Make a new MySQL database
Run web based installation script

Nodes: Nodes are the basic building blocks of all Drupal sites. Every item of content that you add to a Drupal site becomes a node. When you create a page you have created a node. When you create a blog post you have created a node.
One differentiating feature of Drupal is the fact that you have the ability to create custom node types by using the Content Construction Kit (CCK) module.

Drupal comes with a built in taxonomy system. The taxonomy system allows you to categorize the nodes on your site. The taxonomy system allows you to define vocabularies which consist of one or more terms. Vocabularies allow you to organize your terms into groups.
This taxonomy system makes Drupal very flexible and very powerful because you can use your categories and terms to display the content on your site in a variety of different ways. For example, a contributed module called Tagadelic allows you to display categories as a tag cloud.

Drupal generates a wide variety of RSS feeds. RSS allows site administrators and visitors to keep track of new content by subscribing in a feed reader.
Every Drupal site has a site level RSS feed that shows at the address www.yoursite.com/rss.xml . RSS fieds are generated by each category you create as well. When viewing a particular category look for the feed icon

Modules add functionality to your Drupal site. The core installation of Drupal includes several modules which are known as core modules. There are several key core modules that you should consider enabling on any Drupal-powered website.

Path
Menu
Blog
Comments
Search
Upload
Profile
Tracker

Menu Systems – Primary and Secondary
A closer look into Content Creation
Blocks
Books – Organizing contents
Taxonomy
URL Aliasing
Site maintenance
Error Reporting

Installing contributed module – DHTML Menu
Download the module from drupal.org
Upload and unzip the file in /sites/all/modules folder of your drupal installation folder on the server.
Navigate to Site building ->modules.
Activate the module.
Enjoy the new functionality.

This module allows Drupal to replace textarea fields with the FCKeditor - a visual HTML editor, sometimes called WYSIWYG editor.
You should Enable file upload feature for uploading image.
A Office 2003 like editing interface.
Embed Flash videos, upload image, and do rich text formatting – No more HTML.

User Roles
Permissions
User Settings
Whenever you install a new module, always check the permission to suit your needs.

Image
Image Module
Image Field
Gallery
Video
Directly Embed Videos
Flash Video Module
FLV Media Player Module.
Kaltura Module
Audio
Audio Module
MediaField Module

Creates a new Content type Image.
Allow Images to be automatically resized like thumbnails and preview.
Create Image Gallery.
Bulk image import

You are familiar with URL Alias we talked about.
Pathauto automate the process of giving unique search engine friendly path to nodes.
We will need token module to install pathauto.
Configure pathauto by going to URL Alias settings

Download Contributed module from www.drupal.org
Unzip and upload the theme folder to sites/all/modules folder.
Go to Site building -> Themes
Enable the new detected theme.
Configure theme specific settings.
Add slide logo and favicon image.

Forum allow threaded discussion on your site.
Enable forum module
Set up new discussion forum and use containers to organize.

Enable Clean URLs
Pathauto module
Never rename previously existent links
Install Global Redirect Module
Install metatag/ Nodeword module
Meta description – an important metatag The meta description should be different on every page for best results. The meta description should be one or two brief sentences to summarize the page.

Page Title Module
There should be one H1 tag in every file
Always use a custom front page.

Drupal provides the CCK module as a way to build custom content types that can be tailored to suit your needs.
In addition to the basic field types provided by the CCK module, you should also keep an eye out for contribs that extend CCK functionality to provide a huge range of useful field enhancements.
Text, number, node reference, user reference options widget fields are provided by default.

Imagefield
Mediafield
Email field
Link field
Date Field
And many more

Using PHP
Install Content Template Module
But, we will consider Composite Layout – its easy and simple to start with.

You can use blocks as a very simple way to customize the look of your site.
Blocks can contain lists of posts, widgets or even custom php code snippets .
You have a great amount of control over who sees a block and where they are placed.
Many modules will add special blocks to your site.
More advanced site builders can utilize the views module to create dynamic blocks from content on their site.

The Views module provides a flexible method for Drupal site designers to control how lists of content of almost anything are presented.
This tool is essentially a smart query builder that, given enough information, can build the proper query, execute it, and display the results.

Every Drupal install requires regular actions to handle maintenance tasks such as cleaning up log files and checking for updates. Cron.php is the file that Drupal uses to run the maintenance process.
For instance, if your site were www.example.com , loading the URL http://www.example.com/cron.php in your browser would run the maintenance.

Sitemap module
Slider
Ticketyboo News Ticker
Paging
Ipaper
Collapse Text
Panel
Tabs
Nice Menu

Routinely change administration password.
Protect your site registration form, contact form and comments with anti-spam measures. – Mollen, Akismet, Capcha
Block Access to offending IP
Allow only Basic HTML to Anonymous users
Routinely update modules and core
Don’t worry, drupal is very secure

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Beginner's guide to drupal

by mayank.grd on Jan 21, 2009

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Beginner’s guide to drupal — Presentation Transcript