Get Rich With Drupal

In order to get rich with Drupal first you have to install it on a webhost. I have signed up with Site5.com which I have used for other projects before. They are cheap (under $10 per month for unlimited websites, unlimited space and unlimited bandwidth) and the service is good.

There are two ways in which Drupal can be installed on Site5:

• manually (the hard way
• via Fantastico (the easy way)

I'm lazy so I install this via Fantastico. I've read somewhere on the Drupal forums, that it's not recommended to run a production website on a Drupal which has been installed with Fantastico, but I guess I can always change settings later if I have to, even on a Fantastico Drupal.

In case you don't know what Fantastico is, or your webhost doesn't support it. Fantastica is a collection of popular scripts (or web applications) which you can install on your site with one or two mouse clicks. Pretty neat, huh? You can use it to try out different scripts without spending too much time on installing them. Following is an image which shows you where you can find Fantastico on site5.

Next when you open Fantastico it displays a list of software which you can install. You can see that there are also Drupal's 'competitors' listed: Joomla, Mambo, Typo3, Xoops, etc. I actually went and installed all of them at one time and played around with each of them before finally settling on Drupal.

I won't go into the steps needed to install Drupal as it is pretty straightforward. When you are finished you will see the standard Drupal website look, which I personally find a bit bland. I guess to change the look I will have to learn how to install a different theme, but I won't go there today.

That was easy! Now I will explore the Drupal administration menu and start setting some sensible options.

1. Changing the site name and description

You can change the site name (what is displayed next to the logo) and other site information by going to "Administer->Site Configuration->Site Information". I will only change the name and email adress and leave slogan, mission statement and all the rest alone. My title says it all!

2. Adding content

I want to use this site to post my experiences with Drupal (and how I get rich with using it). So I go to "Create Content" and ... there are two options, Page and Story, which should I choose? Since this is kind of a blog site I go for Story and enter all this text....

In fact I didn't go for the Story type at first, but loaded the blog module and created blog entries. But after reading this article I decided that that was a mistake and did it all again to use Story instead of blog... A learning experience, don't use blog in Drupal unless you will have many users who will each have their own blog on your site. If it's just a personal blog, go with Story.