Dawid Ciężarkiewicz

Installation and hosting

I've decided to use Drupal 6. This is obvious choice as it's seems current and stable. Nothing to add here, I guess.

I must admit that installation was very straightforward and easy. Nothing really tricky. However I had some problems with hosting. On the current hosting provider that the organization is using: strefa.pl installation failed. After editing .htdocs file and removing "Option" sections I was able to get initial stage of installation, but it couldn't finish.

I've searched the web and found out that public opinion about this hosting is very bad and even on the most known polish hosting provider: home.pl things may need some trickery because they are not using apache.

After some research I've decided to try linuxpl.com hosting and so far I'm happy with the choice. It seems everything I need will be working even on the most basis hosting option, which is very cheap solution for me. However it's far to early to make any strong opinions about the overall quality of this hosting. But I must admit that the fact they have a linux in the name pleases me. They claim they give ssh access after fully activating the account (paying ;) ) which seems neat.

First impression

Right after installation Drupal functionality seemed painfully limited. Navigation is easy but I couldn't see where did the whole Drupal hype came from. I had no idea how to make anything more useful than basic WordPress installation …

However I've made a long journey to read about how to use Drupal and quickly discovered that it's very powerful after extending it with Drupal modules .

Understanding howto use Drupal

I think I've got it all figured out now, after few days with toying with it so I'll quickly describe what I think may help others to understand how to use Drupal.

Content on the page

Basically each page view in Drupal seems to be build from the following elements:

• menus
• blocks
• page content
• other minor elements

Menu configuration is very similar to the solutions from other CMSs - hierarchical system with few roots (primary links, secondary links, navigation). Of course you can do more advanced stuff with it, but the basic concept is simple.

Blocks for me are … widgets. Each site theme provides you with regions like: header, footer, left column, right column, etc. . In the block configuration menu you can put blocks (widgets) in the places (regions) you like with some more advanced options (what to display, when, and in what way). You can create your own blocks as well (more about this later).

Main content is displayed in the main content area (at least basically).

Modules

Drupal is all about it's modules. Take a look how many of them is there: Drupal modules. Got to the http://yoursite.com/admin/build/modules and get familiar with it. Installation of new modules is a matter of dropping extracted module to the modules subdirectory and enabling it on the module administration page.

Internationalization

If you're not going to use it you may consider installing it anyway. But if know you're going to use it at some point: install, configure it and play with it on the very beginning. It will save your time discovering how does it connect with other modules later. I18n is available almost everywhere and its configuration is on each and every place.

Content and CCK

Content Construction Kit (CCK) is the very basic module that you should install at the very beginning and which is crucial for the way Drupal works.

The basic idea is not to use page or article for everything on you site, but to create a content category for the things you want to be a content. If you're creating a site about music you may want to have a song, artist or album content type. Each content type may have a custom fields. Album will probably refer to it author as a artist reference, have it's cover (as image that you can upload). A song may refer to the album on which it's placed. This is all achievable through adding fields.

What does it give? It gives a structure to your content. Instead of thinking about the categories and pages - you create a content first. And then you can do some magic with other modules to make this objects display in many various ways. Create a widget to display "other songs for this artist", etc.

Views

Next main modules is the Views. It's damn hard to understand and learn, but it's incredibly powerful. Using structured data from the CCK you can create page content, blocks (widgets) with any functionality you imagine. You will have to seek for solutions on the web at first, but after a while you will have and menus, widgets and pages that you desire.

Big advice - read the provided documentation first. Learn how to create basic views and then implement some ideas described by other people on the web. You may have to code (or at least copy) some PHP to get more advanced views. And you may have a hard time figuring out what the heck is going on at first. But it's totally worth it.

And remember to look at the publication date of documents you read. Views 2 is the version you're using. There are many tutorials on the web that describe other older versions.

Taxonomy

Taxonomy module will allow you to attach abstract terms to the content. You can use many sets of terms for different purposes. This is used by Views and CCK. Read a documentation and understand how this works - it will be crucial for efficient use of Views and CCK.

Other modules

At the moment in my modules directory is about 60 entries.

Below are the one that I find most important:

admin_menu

Displays a handy administration menu to let you quickly work with your site. Very useful for site administator.

cck

Already described. A must-have.

extlink

Put these nice arrows next to outgoing links.

google_analytics

Obviously, you'll want to watch some stats about the result of your work.

imagecache

A must have if you're going to work with images in your content. Lets you configure profiles for the images to have them in desired sizes here and there.

imagefield

Lets you add fields of image type to your CCK content. As the above - a must-have.

masquerade

Want to take quick look how does the site looks like for particular user? This is it.

profile

Let's you configure a Profile content type where users put information about themselves.

realname

If you want users to be identified by the full names instead of logins - this will to the job.

taxonomy

Already described. A must-have.

views

Already described. A must-have indeed.

Summary

Drupal is powerful, but damn hard to understand at first. And things that make it powerful like CCK and Views are definitely not configurable for non tech-savy users. Each web site will have to get some kind of skilled admin that will get it up and running, understand relational databases (Views) and will be familiar with how do pieces (modules) work together. However it is possible to create an environment in which normal users (content editors, translators, users) will feel comfortable and able to work.