Building a site with Drupal 7

There are a lot of people that have written articles on setting up various blogging or content management packages on the web, one of the problems I’ve faced in the past is that a lot of these assume that the reader has some experience either in coding or in development. My plan is to break it down into manageable chunks that will help people with no previous experience get their site up and running as painlessly as possible. There are quite a few established packages out there, and I’ve used several over the 10 years that I’ve been building personal sites. Each has its own strengths and downfalls depending on what the needs are for the project. This makes it important to sit down and figure out what you want your site to do before you get started.

My goal for this site is to collect groups of articles on particular topics together, as well as giving me a place to blog about various things that only my family will really care about. I want to share pictures with friends, and in thinking ahead, I may at some point want forums so that others can contribute their information and suggestions on how to help others as well. I’ve also considered the possibility of selling patterns, crafts or templates for web pages, so I’ll need to think about that as well, even though that section isn’t a priority at the moment.

Looking at my requirements, I’ve decided to use Drupal to design my site. I’ve always liked their book system for organizing articles, and this single package can provide the flexibility to add everything I could potentially want down the road. Aside from the physical tools that the package provides, I wanted to use Drupal because the community of developers and users are an amazing friendly bunch of people who are very good at answering questions and helping new users. There are groups that meet up regularly in various cities across the world, so check Meetup.com and the Drupal.org forums to see if there are groups or workshops in your area.

Currently, Drupal 7 is in beta, but with a release candidate available, I decided to use this version for my site and examples as it will be the newest version of the package available. I will also admit that while I do this in my spare time, I do have a husband who does it for a living. This means if I get stuck I have someone to go to for help. My problem is that when he jumps in to explain things, it sometimes goes over my head, hence the write up here breaking things down, because if I’m having issues, then I know others are as well.

One of the great things about Drupal is that you get a good amount of core functionality built into the basic system. However there is always the chance, that you may need the site to do something that isn’t in the base package. This is where the community comes in. There is a large collection of modules that can be installed to add to the base package and extend the functionality of your site. This is great if you are new to coding because most of the time, you can just upload and activate the module and someone else has done the hard part for you.

Following will be a series of articles detailing the install and theme development of this blog.