Run Drupal

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: Read more »

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. Read more »

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. Read more »

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. Read more »

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. Read more »

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. Read more »

Often I see people asking what are some simple things I can do to get better rankings in search engines. Well with Drupal one thing you can do is a no brainer. Every Drupal site that cares about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) must first enable clean URLs and second must install Path Auto. For those of you who don’t know what these are let me elaborate just a bit. Read more »

Back when I was first starting to look at different Content Management Systems (CMS) one of the reasons I decided to go with Drupal was because I heard from different people that it was much more Search Engine Friendly (SEF) when compared to the other CMS’s out there. This excited me not because I was an SEO expert but precisely the opposite – because I knew SEO was valuable but didn’t know what it meant to optimize my sites.

Since then I have learned much more about Search Engine optimization and I have come to two conclusions: Read more »

Anyone who has been doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for a very long knows that what you title your web pages is very important. To get a little technical, since there can be some confusion, when I refer to Page Titles I mean what is between the <title> and </title> tags in the heading portion of a web page. This is the title that shows at the top of your web browser when visiting a page. Read more »

Often I find myself working with my Drupal sites to install add-on modules in order to add some functionality I need or want. In the past the way I did this was by first downloading the module I wanted to my local computer, unzipping it, and then uploading it to my web server that hosts  my Drupal site. Read more »