Run Drupal

Anyone who has played around with Drupal and other content management systems much knows that sometimes Drupal’s Administration backend can be a bit clunky to work with. You end up navigating through many levels of menus just to change some settings. For example if you would like to Uninstall a module you will need to work your way through the Administer –> Site Building –> Modules menu and then click on the Uninstall tab.

I have been using Drupal for a few years now. All and all I have been very impressed with things. One of the largest annoyances I’ve had in the past was having to use the web interface to add new node content. I know there are WYSIWYG modules out there that help with this and I have spent the time setting them up on all my sites for the times when I just needed to do a quick post. However, I still found myself often creating my node with a desktop HTML editor and then simply copying and pasting the HTML into the normal body textbox of a node.

Often with a site like this one, where people come to get Drupal help and tutorials, visitors would like to view an article either in a printer friendly format or download it as a PDF. Also at times they may want to email an article to a friend or college who would be interested in reading it. Once again Drupal comes through with a great contributed module to allow us to do this. It is called the Printer, e-mail, and PDF versions module.

So every install of Drupal comes with the Help Module installed by default (in the Core – optional section). This module provides some basic help functionality for those people that are starting out with the great content management solution known as Drupal.

A default Drupal installation has different Roles for anonymous users and authenticated users. It also has one user defined as an Administrator but he or she is not in a speical role instead the Admin account is simply added to the authenticated users role. This isn’t a big deal most of the time because each module that needs to simply checks to see if the user logged in is the Administrator and if so the module gives the user access to everything.

It is fairly easy to get a simple blog up and running using Drupal. However, one common annoyance among Drupal users who have switched over from other blogging platforms such as Wordpress, Blogspot, etc. is how Drupal shows blog summaries on the front page. By default Drupal’s front page stories look something like this: