Drupal For Dummies

Lynn Beighley, Seamus Bellamy

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118147504
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Web Design

Learn to set up, manage, and administer a Drupal web site

Drupal offers unparalleled flexibility for content-managed web sites, and Drupal 7 is the easiest version to use yet. This new edition teaches you the fast, fun, and easy way to get started with Drupal. Even if you have no Drupal experience, you'll quickly learn how to download and install Drupal, set up your first content-managed site, apply templates, use modules, and more.

Drupal gurus Lynn Beighley and Seamus Bellamy show you how to take advantage of what Drupal has to offer, make the most of the new features in Drupal 7, and demystify perplexing Drupal issues.

• Drupal is a free, open source modular framework and content management system designed for content-managed web sites
• Shows you how to download Drupal; no programming experience required
• Looks at Drupal 7 and explains new features that make it is easier to use than previous iterations of Drupal for a creating a blog, content site, or eBusiness site
• Explains how to organize and create your site's content, apply templates, and get your first site up and running
• Details the ways to use modules and third-party templates

Whether you're looking to implement a flexible content management system, turbocharge a blog with photo galleries, or administer a third-party Drupal site, this book gets you off to a running start!

Part I

Getting Started with Drupal

In this part . . .

You want a website. But the kid next door doesn’t know enough to build what you need — and the web design company wants to charge you an arm and a leg. Just when you’re about to give in and pay too much, you overhear a conversation about Drupal, and how you can build a website with it.

But when you try it, you don’t find it easy. The documentation is hard to follow, and you can’t find anything in the Drupal interface.

If this has happened to you, you’ll appreciate the chapters in this part. They provide a gentle introduction to building your first website with Drupal.

What if you don’t even have Drupal and need to install it? Then the chapters in this part take you to the very beginning. That way your site will be up and ready to be enhanced by the great stuff in the chapters in Parts II and beyond.

Chapter 1

The Big Picture

In This Chapter

Understanding open source software

Comparing Content Management Systems

Developing a website with Drupal

Knowing Drupal’s potential

At the dawn of time, if you wanted to create a fully featured website with forms, a blog, and a message board, you practically had to be a computer programmer — or at least have enough dirt on a programmer to bribe him into building a website for you. You needed to know how to write HTML (and possibly JavaScript and CSS), and to accomplish anything dynamic, you needed to know yet another language such as PHP or ASP. You probably would have needed to know SQL, the language that allows websites to store and retrieve information.

As the waters receded and the years wore on, web developers grew weary of having to build each and every site from scratch and began freely sharing code. If you knew some HTML and a few other things, you could use the work of other people to knit your site together. No longer did you need to write code every time you wanted a contact form or poll or image library on your website.

Today, we have entire robust and powerful web applications, supported by communities of web developers. Enter Drupal. Drupal is one of a class of web applications that do nearly all the work for you. You can build a site with Drupal without ever writing a single line of code. Indeed, that’s the ultimate goal of Drupal: to free you from the inner workings of the code and instead let you focus on the layout and content of your site. There are other, similar applications you can use that also accomplish this, but Drupal is one of the best open source applications for quick, code-free website creation. In short, Drupal, just like RuPaul, makes looking good look easy.

Before we get into the installation and use of Drupal, we think it’s helpful to start by introducing the features of Drupal. After all, there’s no sense in installing it if you don’t know what it does, right? The more you understand about what Drupal is, the better you can plan and use it to your advantage.

What Drupal Is

The official Drupal website, http://drupal.org, describes Drupal as “a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website.” This is a great description of this application. It’s free, as long as you follow certain rules that we mention later in this chapter. Drupal allows for a wide variety of content, making it extremely flexible and customizable. The fact that more than one individual can publish and manage content makes it a Content Management System (CMS). We explain each of these important characteristics of Drupal in more detail a little bit later on.

Free

Drupal is distributed as open source software. This means that you can get a copy of the program and install it on your web server, modify the appearance of the pages and layout to suit your needs, and add your content to it without paying for the program. It seems too good to be true!

Software designated as open source essentially...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Introduction
• Part I: Getting Started with Drupal
• Part II: Your First Drupal Site
• Part III: Bending Drupal to Your Will
• Part IV: Taking Drupal to the Next Level
• Part V: The Part of Tens
• Cheat Sheet