Drupal is one of many opensource Content Management Systems (CMS)available to us today. It is a very popular package for website development and the one I tend to use most often for client website development. It is a widely adopted opensource CMS written in PHP. It has been developed by a vast community and there are a large number of modules which can be added to the base system to enable all kinds of features. It does take some time for a new website developer to become accustomed the the system. Here are the steps involved to create a Drupal website:

Installing Drupal. The installation is really quite simple. Download it, follow the instructions to create a database for the website, configure your web-server for your new site and then the rest is all done through the website interface.

Configure Drupal. For a new user Drupal configuration takes some getting used to, however with perservarance you will soon be well on the way to developing your website. You will soon figure out how to change website information, setting up menus, changing themes, hiding things that you don’t want to display. There are also lots of useful tutorials around on youtube and the drupal.org website is useful.

Choosing a theme. You have the choice of creating your own theme from scratch or picking an already made theme and modify it to suit your requirements. Themes are designed to integrate with Drupal nicely. They will likely look the same on all popular browsers, will be HTML standard compliant, search engine optimized (SEO). Try using theme garden, where you will find many template themes to pick from.

Install modules. Drupal is easily extended through the use of modules. These modules are a strong positive point for drupal which has a vast community actively developing modules for it. If you ever need to do something or add a feature to your website most likely there is a module to do it.

Some popular modules

There are some many modules that you could never list them all. Some examples of great modules for such things as creating a Blog, Comments, RSS, Forum, Search, Localization, Content categorization. But the true power lies in modules developed by the Drupal community. A few examples:

• CCKContent construction kit allows you to add custom fields to content nodes. This is a very powerful tool and a must add one for all sites
• Pathauto. Allows to configure how the website URLs are constructed. Keeps them simple and east to read.
• Views. An essential modules for Drupal. Allows you to customise how content is presented on different pages.
• Nodewords. Allows you to add meta tags to the site. Very useful to provide custom meta descriptions for content pages. Descriptions are important for SEO.
• Page Title. This module allows you to added titles to website pages which is good to improve the site SEO.
• Lightbox2. Very nice plugin to display images and slideshows on the website.
• Node Gallery. A good simple module to help you create an image gallery for Drupal. Integrates well with Lightbox2.
• Wysiwyg. Allows to replace a simple content text editor with a rich text editor of your choice. Good for the customer, allowing them to easily manage the sites content, add pictures etc.
• Google Analytics. Adds google analytics tracking. Provides powerful per user configuration.
• Backup and Migrate. Creates scheduled website backups in case there’s an emergency.
• Any of course there are many other modules…

Pros and Cons of Drupal

Drupal has many positive features:

• Extremely easy to install on any webserver.
• Has a vast community developing modules and providing technical help.
• Has a huge amount of freely available themes to pick from.
• Is very well adopted and maintained which means that bugs are fixed, security patches are released and new cutting edge features are always on the horizon.
• Drupal is fast. Maybe it’s not the fastest content management system in the world but it certainly is fast. It’s very easy to set Drupal cache settings which give an immediate boost to the website.
• It’s relatively easy to set up a website that is Search Engine Optimized aka SEO.

Like everything in life Drupal has a few gotchas to keep in mind:

• For new users Drupal may be overwhelming somewhat chaotic and hectic. It’s still very easy to set up a theme and enter content. But you may have to scratch your head for a while.
• Drupal is quite old and even it’s actively developed lot’s of it is written in procedural PHP. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but in some way means that it’s not a top cutting edge software modelling masterpiece.
• Even though Drupal has a huge community which develops modules for it some of the modules don’t have very good documentation. More often than not these are the less used ones. It’s not Drupal’s fault but it’s still confusing and somewhat frustrating to try and figure out where and how you can configure some module you’ve just installed.

All in all I’m very happy with Drupal. I believe it is an amazing project and I’m giving my thanks to the Drupal community for all the greats things they are doing.