Drupal, strength in flexability

Lars S. Linnet — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 10:54:39 +0000

What is it?
A content management system (cms) and a community management system or a blog if you would rater like that. Drupal is what you define it to be, it allows you to pick and choose what you want to do on your site! Which at first can be very confusing, but when you learn how it work it is one of, if not the, strongest site building system. It is almost only your own imagination that sets the limit to what you want out of your site, when using drupal.
What can I use it for?
Basically anything that you can imaging, want to start a community about white wooden fences or some other really weird subject. Just define what the users should be allowed to do, what kinda of content the site will be working with and you are done. Haven’t found something that it can’t really do, as the entire frame of the system is build to be flexible and extended. There is a extremely long list of features that can be done with drupal, just to mention a few:

Content Management Systems
Blogs
Collaborative authoring environments
Forums
Peer-to-peer networking
Newsletters
Podcasting
Picture galleries
File uploads and downloads

How do I get started?
Before you start installing stuff and typing in content, you should consider what purpose your site will have, how should it look and what types of content should it contain? Will you deliver all the content or will the users contribute it? How will the user navigate the content?
Pre-install
Be sure to consider all the questions and define every element of the site with a lot of very specific details, the more precise you are when defining what the site should be the better. It’s not hard to create the design for a site, it’s the content of the site that will take the time to do right.
While you keep thinking of the above, you might as well find the right host for your Drupal installation, not all hosting companies support the specific requirements for hosting Drupal, take a look at Drupal’s System Requirements and make sure it complies with your hosting solution.
One of the points to really notice is “PHP memory of 16MB or higher for a default Drupal 6 installation”, when you really gets going with drupal it shouldn’t be hard to exceed this limit. I usual run around 32MB PHP memory. You will exceed this limit rather quickly when you start working with the Devel Module, which is a module I can’t live without when creating themes or modifying them.

When you have all of this under control you can start by going over to Drupal’s homepage and download the Latest none Dev version of it, which is currently 6.4 (released 2008-aug-14).

At this point I expect you to have the following ready.

A strong definition of how your site should be.
A copy of drupal on the Hosting solution of your choice

I will not get into detail of how you should upload the files to the host nor how you install the basic steps of Drupal, you can find tons of articals about this on the net, Drupal’s official installation guide might be a good one to start with.

After you are done installing and pondering around inside your newly installed Drupal site, you should start setting up the installation so that it meets your needs. You are most proberly going to need a few of the most used Modules such as CCK, Views, Backup and Migrate, Pathauto and XML Sitemap. All of which is modules I would use on almost any site, of course this again depends on what requirements you have for the site.

This is just meant as a minor teaser and introduction into Drupal and help you make the right choices when preparing to start out with it.

Lars S. Linnet » CMS

Drupal, strength in flexability