Run Drupal

I recently launched another site with my wife. She is a graphic designer and can you know make stuff actually look nice. Along with this she has done a ton of Do It Yourself (DIY) craft projects. Everything from quilts to simple fun things like homemade Play-do with our toddler. For a while now I've been trying to convince her to start a site where she would post all these craft tutorials and she has finally gotten around to doing it.

I recently have been working on a site that doesn't use Drupal but instead uses a very simple inline CMS. The site is called Taking Back Ground Bozeman. It is the home page for a ministry called Taking Back Ground which focuses on helping people who are struggling with addictions to pornography or similar issues. Here is a summary of what the site is about:

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.

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.

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.

I launched another a Drupal website this weekend. This one for my wife. Over the past few months she has started a business that needed an e-commerce site. This gave me the perfect chance to try out ubercart and all of Druapl's online shopping accessories. With this Canyon Creek Bags was launched! It made it very easy to launch a great site when your wife is a Graphic Designer! We utilized a custom theme that she designed and I implemented in CSS and PHPTemplate.

You will find many sites online that tell you how to install a module on your Drupal site. The problem is most of them tell you wrong. This simple Drupal tutorial walks you step by step through installing a module the correct way. There are many different ways to install a downloaded Drupal module, but unless you do it this way you will find it much harder to keep track of installed modules and much harder to update as new versions of your module come out. Following this tutorial also makes it easier to upgrade to future versions of Drupal.

After installing a new Drupal site you may be wondering what to do next. I would advise reading tons of drupal tutorials, blog posts, and forum posts. However, I know this can be a little overwhelming at first. So here is a list of the top 10 things I think you should do after installing drupal.

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