Drupal Basics Video

If you are new in Drupal, this video should help you in your very basics of your handling with Drupal.

Frontpage Regions - Panels Module

There is a short article about frontpage with regions in Theme developer's guide. It offers some advices how to achieve this by using defined block regions. In my opinion, this solution is not easy to stylize. Far better solution lies in Panels Module.

"This module allows you to create pages that are divided into areas of the page." You can define arbitrary areas and then assign a view, block, custom new content or existing content to every area. Every area may have more than one content. Additionally is possible to set css id to all areas. This allows you to simply theme the frontpage via css.

Development of a simple small website

Simple small website is for example a company web containing about 5 pages with some information and contact. This is the easiest job in Drupal. No additional modules or skills needed. Everything you need is just your mouse. So let's go for it.

1. Do the Drupal installation and create the first user (administrator)
2. Allow module "Path" in Administer->Build->Modules
3. In navigation Create content->page ... this allows you to create a new page
4. Fill the form (with module "Path" you can enter an URL) and click on submit
   Your first node was created and exists on entered address or in URL www.example.com/?q=node/1
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 according to how many pages you need.
6. Now go to Administer->Build->Menu and edit Primary links. Primary links are the main menu of your website. Add items for pages you want to have a link from the menu. One item contains a title and URL of linked page.
7. In navigation visit Administer->Settings->Site information and edit informations about your website. You can change pagetitle, description, footer etc.
   
   Now, we have completed the simple small website. Look forward to next articles, which will help you improve your Drupal website. We will use additional modules and after a while we will start doing own template.

Drupal installation

This tutorial should be able to help all users, who need help with installing the Drupal 5 core on the webserver in few minutes. It is very simple operation, so I hope, no problem will appear after reading following instruction list. Let's proceed from the very beginning:

1. Download the latest version of Drupal core from official Drupal website and extract it on your harddrive. Some countries have its own localized version of the core. It's up to you what you are giving way to. Localized versions have the same functionality. They are only translated to the specified language.
2. Run your FTP client, log in your FTP account and copy all extracted files in the root folder. Your root folders name is usually “www” or “htdocs”. If you are not sure about this, ask your hosting company.
3. If you were successful in copying, log in your MySQL manager (PHPMyAdmin or any), create new database and remember the name you used. It's not necessary to choose collation, Drupal use UTF-8 automaticly.
4. Now, open your web browser and visit URL www.example.com/install.php. Instead of example.com use your domain name.
5. Drupal installation page will come in view. Read the instructions and fill the form properly. Database type is usually mysql.
6. Enter database name (you should remember it from step 3), database username and password (your hosting company provides certainly these informations to you). Under collapsible “Advanced options” choice are some optional fields.
7. Database host is mandatory, however, is defaultly set on “localhost”. Check this value with informations provided by your hosting company to you.
8. Database port - let it blank, if you are not sure about it. When your database service runs on another port, this field is the way to set it. Table prefix is useful in case of more drupal installations in one database. You can distinguish more Drupals with this prefix.
9. Submit the form. The “Installation complete” window should display. Then proceed to the frontpage.
10. We can also include first user (admin) creating in the installation process.

I hope this tutorial will help you solve all problems with installation. In event of problems use comments.

CMS Drupal

Introduction
Drupal is in the present time the most sophisticated CMS (Content Management System) on Internet. It's popular all over the world. Its main advantages are wide social network, which is still improving the system and makes an effort to approach it to general public, personalisation and security. Whole Drupal is under GNU General Public License 2 (GPL) and contents a large amount of additional modules and themes. It's installation is very simple and the homepage Drupal.org includes entire informations from global news up to useful tutorials which helps beginners and advanced users how to sort out any problem. Everybody can access the huge Drupal API and look inside the core of the system.

The core is written in PHP and cooperates with MySQL or PostgreSQL database engines. Drupal core consists from modules. However, there is a variety of other modules. Developers can simply download a module, copy it into the Drupal site and install it within the administration. Every module has its own ability and functionality.

Main Purpose
The aim of Drupal is to be the powerful engine of websites, which can simply build and handle every user. Drupal is still on the way, however the awaiting version 6.0 will provide lots of new features and improvements. It also should approach Drupal to regular users. Drupal is now able to be extended by official modules to a variety of website types from a simple weblog to extensive e-shop or a huge application.

Requirements
CMS Drupal is easy to install on the most of hosting programms. Its minimal requirements are: Web server, the best choice is Apache PHP version 4.3.3 and higherMySQL version at least 4.0 or PostgreSQL at least 7.0Database user has to be allowed to CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES and LOCK TABLES. Some modules require .htaccess file and mod_rewrite support