Welcome
Run Drupal .COM was setup to teach people how to run a full Drupal website. I have created tutorials and blog posts here describing my journey in the learning process. Drupal is a very powerful content management system but it does have a bit of a learning curve. As I learn I will post Drupal Tutorials and Drupal Articles on what I'm learning so others may benefit. Hope you enjoy learning with me!
Linode Review
My Experience With Linode
A while back I decided to make the jump from shared hosting to a VPS. Shared hosting has many draw backs. The biggest of which is that most shared hosting places throw you on a box with 100's of other websites. If anyone of those sites has something go wrong many times it causes your site to crash or be inaccessible. Running a Drupal site I had this happen many times. Someone else would hammer the MySQL database and it would make my site not work.
more...Tracking Statistics with Google Analytics
I love to know who's visiting my site, where from, and what they are looking at. Its interesting information in and of itself but it also helps greatly when adding advertisements to your site. Another thing I like to look at is how many people are using FireFox versus that other internet browser
Google has a great free service called Google Analytics. All you have to do is sign up for the service and then you can have a fairly high quality visitor tracking service. Here's how you get your Drupal site set up with Google Analytics.
more...Switched to Linode
I just switched rundrupal.com over from a shared hosting plan to a VPS through Linode. It costs a little more but I get full control over the server and the uptime should be much better. Unless I don't do a good job setting everything up. I'll be giving updates on this site as to how the process goes. Right now I have this website running well on it and I'm in the process of getting all the email stuff set up. Here's hoping that all works out.
New theme for Run Drupal
Today I launched my new theme for this site. It is a modified version of a the CrystalX design from open source web designs. I broke it up and made it fit for Drupal. Then I added a bunch of changes and tweaks that fit with my style and what I wanted for this site. I'm pretty pleased with how it all turned out.
Force TinyMCE's Background to always be white
When setting up a Tiny MCE profile you can specify what CSS settings to use. By default it uses your themes CSS settings. This is nice, because then as you add text it truly is WYSIWYG. The problem is if you have a colored or picture background in your theme. For example on this site I have a background image but all my content is displayed on a white background. However, TinyMCE will not display a white background when typing instead it will display a gradiant.
more...How I transfered my domain from GoDaddy to namecheap.com
I've always used GoDaddy for my domain registration. However, I find it really annoying that they make me jump through a bunch of hoops every time a register a site. I hate having to click no thanks to all their extra "features" they want to sell me. I'm also pretty annoyed with the way they run their advertisements.
more...Adding a search floater bar to your theme
Today I added the search floater to run Drupal. A search floater is the search box you see up in the upper right corner of this website. By default if you enable the Search block in Drupal you can add it to a region. For example it could be added to the left content bar. However, I don't like this very much since it takes up a bunch of room. Instead I wanted the search box to float in the upper right of every page.
Adding this was pretty easy. here is the code I added to the page.tpl.php file
more...How to Install Drupal Tutorial
Installing Drupal has gotten easier and easier throughout the years. It can be broken down into these steps.
1. Downloading and preparing the Drupal installation files
2. Setting up the mySQL database
3. Running the drupal install program
more...Site Launched
Today I launched the official Run Drupal website. My goal in this site is to have a place where people can learn all the ins and outs of running a full Drupal website. I've been working with Drupal for over a year now and I've learned a lot along the way. I will post things I've already learned as tutorials on this site. As I learn new things I will be continuously updating this blog in a quick fashion. Then once I've had a little more time I will try to write tutorials off of my blog posts.
more...