the s3cr3t drupal formula
Posted Sunday, March 8th, 2009A Quick Start Guide for a Standard CMS Using Drupal 5
These are the basic steps I go through each time I make a Drupal site. They are not a secret. The very fact you’re reading it means it could not possibly be a secret. Nice try, though.
A Drupal site can be made in many different ways, the steps below will lay the ground work for a site that is user friendly and behaves itself. This guide is not intended for hardcore development geeks or first time users – it’s just a blueprint for creating a safe and solid CMS with Drupal.
I’ll be expanding this post and also creating another page for Drupal 6 sometime soon. Keep your pants on. Thanks to Amy Steen for her input on this guide!
PS. There are lots of ways to make a site with Drupal and if you think you have a way I’d love to hear about it.
s3cr3t formula
- Download and install the latest version of Drupal 5
- Make sure to set the database collation to UTF8_General_ci
- Create some sub directories in sites/all directory (sites/all/modules and sites/all/themes)
- Register your admin account, pick a secure password
- Change user registration settings to “Only site administrators can create new user accounts” (user management > user settings)
- Create writeable files directory (follow alert box) – this directory will hold the files you’ll upload
- Run cron for the first time (follow alert box)
- Configure “clean-urls”, you might need to edit .htaccess (site config > clean urls)
- Install some base modules into sites/all/modules directory:
- administration menu – installs a helpful menubar at the top of the page
- backup & migrate – an insurance policy in case of a site meltdown
- poormanscron – cron’s important for a lot of things but indexing your site so that it can be searched is the most obvious
- token – you don’t need to know, but it’s neccessary for a lot of things to function properly
- image – allows the uploading and management of images
- lightbox2 – images can be overlayed on the current page
- FCKeditor (must be configured) - is a great text editor
- IMCE – makes managing file uploads easier
- mollom – spam blocker
- pathauto – useful if you want to organize your URL’s by year, title, etc
- Enable extra core modules like uploads, path alias, etc.
- Change default input to full html (site config > input formats) Note: if you’re intending your site to have many users you’ll want to leave the default input format as is
- Create “default” role (user management > roles)
- Configure “default” role for fck-editor
And that’s it, at least for now. There’s lots left to do on your way to making a fully functional site, but hopefully this will give you a headstart. I’ll be updating this guide as often as is necessary, please let me know if you’ve got suggestions.
