Drupal

Drupal is a free software package that allows you to easily organize, manage and publish your content, with an endless variety of customization.

[alert]All Drupal settings reside in the settings.php file, but this file is write-protected. So to change anything within that file, you will have to remove the write-protection, change the settings you want and re-set the write-protection. This is done for security reasons.[/alert]

Basic Content Management

Drupal Content Types

The two default content types that are installed in drupal are “Page” and “Story”. The two types are similar in form but have one difference which is that a visitor can post comments on a “Story” entry while a “Page” entry does not allow replies to be posted.

Site Building

The site building section in the drupal administrative panel is where you can edit the overall look of your website. You can install change the theme, change the blocks positions, create or edit new/old menus. All these options are taken care from within this section to better present your site to your visitors ==Basic

Site Configuration

The site configuration section is where the main system settings of your website are fine tuned. You can set actions for your website, edit the date and time, enable/disable clean URLs for your site to be more SEF, etc…

User Management

Control everything related to your registered users, from default user settings to user roles passing the access rules. Every user can have his privileges according to his username, email address or even IP address.

Reports

Reports are the essential tools for administrators to monitor the activity of there website. As an administrator, you can view the 404 errors, the 403 access denied errors. You could even use the Status Report to monitor the operations and problems on the website.

Advanced Features

Themes Installation

Installing themes in Drupal couldn’t be easier. All you have to do is this:

• Download a theme of your choice to your desktop

• On your hosting account, create a new directory under

/drupal_directory/sites/all/

and name it “themes”.

• Upload the archive with a theme to that folder

• Once upload is successful extract the archive via cPanel File Manager

• Go to the Drupal administrative backend

Administer > Site building > Themes

You will see the theme that you have just uploaded. Enable it so it can be used later on.

Pay attention that some themes need additional steps to be installed and therefore you have to look inside the folder that you extracted for a Readme.txt/install.txt file for further details.

If you wish to use the newly installed theme, just select it as your default theme.

Modules Installation

Modules are additional plugins that you can install that would add more functionality to Drupal.

To install new modules, follow the below steps:

• Download a module of your choice to your desktop.

• On your hosting account, create a new directory under

/drupal_directory/sites/all/

and name it “modules”.

• Upload the achieve with a module folder to /modules directory.

• Once upload is successful extract the archive via cPanel File Manager

• Go to the Drupal administrative backend

Administer > Site building > Modules

Enable the newly installed module and then use it freely. You may also note that there are ready installed modules but by default they are NOT enabled.

Multi-Site Installation

The multiple websites can be of same content or even different content and you can all manage them easily.

After installing Drupal and setting it up along with the main domain, it’s time to choose the second domain to be used. Second domain has to be pointed to the root directory of Drupal.

• Under the /sites directory, create a new folder and name it exactly as your second domain

../sites/seconddomain.com

• There is a file named “settings.php” under the /sites/default directory. Copy that file and place a copy of it under the newly created sub-directory

../sites/seconddomain.com/settings.php

The above procedure will allow you to host the same content of the main site, on another domain. In order to host different content for the second domain, you will have to do some extra steps. In the settings.php under the /sites/seconddomain.com edit the following lines accordingly:

$db_url = 'mysql://db_username:db_password@db_server/db_name’; 
$db_prefix = ; $base_url = 'http://www.seconddomain.com';

This would finish the multi-site implementation procedures and would allow you now to handle multiple sites using one drupal codebase.

Backup Drupal

Database backup:

You can create a data base backup by means of phpMyAdmin

cPanel > phpMyAdmin > choose the software Database

• On the top menu of the database table list, click on “Export”

• In the export options, make sure to check:

“Select All” Tables
“Structures” property
“Data” property
“Save as” option

• Click Go and save to the file to your desktop.

Alternatively you can backup the database by means of cPanel Backup tool

cPanel > Files > Backups > Partial Backups > Download a MySQL Database Backup

Core files backup:

Core files are available at Drupal’s root directory.

You should always keep a copy of those files as you may have edited them to tune up your website.