Get Rich With Drupal

Yesterday I explained how I installed Drupal on my Site5.com account using the Fantastico script installer. I also created the first content, but I didn't really show you how to do this.

Today I'll explain how you can create content in Drupal that will make you rich and famous!

When you are logged in to your Drupal site, you see the administration menu on the left side bar. The second option should be "Create Content" and when you click on it you should see two options:

• Create a Page
• Create a Story

A Page and a Story are two different "content types" in your Drupal site. To explain what that means I have to explain how content is stored in Drupal.

Everything you write and store in Drupal is called a "node". Each node has a unique number a node id. So for instance this post which you are reading right now has the node id 3 and you can access it via the url "http://getrichwithdrupal.com/node/3". You can see the "node/3" at the end, which tells Drupal to look up and display the node number 3.

Drupal is a very flexible content management system and can store and display many different types of contents, from blog posts and static pages to book reviews, business directory details and product information on a shopping site. Each of these content types has different data fields which can be edited and displayed.

A blog post may only have a title and body field but a product information may have a price, a color option, an image and availability. But both content items can be accessed via the "node/<id>" url path. Drupal will then look in the database which content type this node has and display the relevant fields accordingly! That is pretty smart and even if this may be complicated at first, it means that there is really nothing that you can't manage with Drupal.

But to get back to the choice between Page and Story. Both aren't so different, both have a title and body field and both can be displayed on the front page and accessed from the menu (if you make it so). So as a rule of thumb I would use a Story for writing blog posts such as this, and a Page to write something that is a timeless piece of information, eg. the About page or a tutorial or a static front page to your site.

I chose the Story type for this article and am presented with a huge input form with some expanded and some collapsed sections.

First I fill in a title for my blog post and then I put some content into the body text field. But what about all these other sections? Let me explain...

• Menu Settings You can assign this post to a menu entry which will appear in any of the defined menu locations. For standard drupal installations these will be "primary", at the very top of a page, "secondary" below the primary and "navigation" located in the left sidebar. I don't want my blog post to appear in a menu, so I just leave this blank.
• Input format Drupal will filter the text which you are writing into the body field according to different rules. An adminstrator can define which rules apply to different content types and users and thus make sure his site is safe from malicious text (also called SQL injection or Cross Site Scripting attacks). The filtered HTML input format will only allow you to use a small subset of HTML so that you can't post images and can't insert Javascript code into a post. The Full HTML input format allows all HTML tags and should really not be available for untrusted users (eg. anonymous). There are also many other input formats available as modules which you can activate, for instance one powerful format allows you to enter PHP code which will be executed when the post is displayed. This is developer stuff so we get into this much later. No worries!
• Revision Information Drupal can store every change you make to every node as distinct revisions, so you can actually go back to an earlier revision if you so choose. Because storing every single change as a new revision would surely fill up your database very quickly, you have to tell Drupal when you actually want to store a new revision. I advise to enter a log message so that you know at a later date what made you store this revision. A good log message would be "First Draft" or "First Published".
• File Attachments This will allow you to upload images and other files to your Drupal system which you can then include in your posts. You have to enable this feature in the module configuration. Go to "Administer - Site Building - Modules" and check the appropriate checkbox for File Uploads in the Core Modules.
• Authoring Information You can change the name which appears as the author when this post is displayed and you can also change the time. But you don't have to, the defaults are quite sensible.
• Publishing Options You can choose to set the post as published which means that anonymous visitors can view this post. When you check "Promote To Frontpage" the post will appear in a teaser format on the frontpage (which is what makes a blog a blog!). If you make it "sticky to the top of the list" this post will always appear all other posts on the frontpage instead of slowly being pushed downwards by newer posts.

Now with all these options explained, fill in the blanks, click "Published" and "Promote to Frontpage" and here you go..... This post goes online!