This is the fourth in the series of Creating a Web Site using Drupal. Here are the earlier ones: First, Second and Third.

Unlike earlier, this post is all text and doesn’t contain a screencast.

Moving Drupal from sub directory to root

Since I have had enough of sNews, I finally thought it is time to move my Drupal installation from /drupal to /. It was as simple as connecting via FTP and moving all the content of /drupal directory one level up. I made sure that I didn’t have index.php or index.html residing at / before you move. I went through some forum posts at drupal.org on what else I should be doing and saw that some have advised to modify the value of $base_url in sites/default/settings.php. I noticed that it’s commented out in my case and hence didn’t modify it.

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In the first and second parts of this tutorial series, I showed you installing Drupal and doing initial configuration. In this video tutorial I peform the following tasks:

• Setting the length of trimmed posts to unlimited so that all the post/story content appears on the index page.
• Adding content i.e., creating a page and story.
• Adding specialized div, p, img etc. tags to the list of allowed HTML for filtered HTML so the attributes don’t get stripped out by Drupal. You can also see that I emptied the rows of cache_filter table so the changes take affect.
• Setting permissions to anonymous and registered users so we can control what modules are visible to whom via Access control.
• Adding a search form and Recent comments blocks to the right side bar.
• Changing the position of the above two blocks.
• Setting up the contact form and adding a link to it in the top right corner (Primary Links).
• Adding the categories I created in my previous screencast to the left side bar. I then moved Login box below the Navigation.
• Adding a link to the page in the page editing form itself.
• Putting a break statement so we can split a story via a Read more.

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In the first part of Creating a web site using Drupal, I showed you how I installed Drupal at http://www.scriptinstall4free.com/drupal/. In the screencast below, I perform the following tasks:

• I let Drupal create a directory by the name files which will house logos, avatars and other media.
• I then enabled Clean URLs.
• I entered the site information namely: Name, E-mail address, Slogan, Mission
• I disabled the default theme’s logo.
• I added a couple of links at the top right where it reads Edit Primary Links.
• I enabled the Contact and Search modules.
• I created a vocabulary called Categories and created my site categories. Drupal allows for hierarchical child categories.

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A series of screencasts (videos) on creating a web site using Drupal CMS right from installation to configuration to administration including notes jotted down during the process.

At the end of this tutorial series, you will be able to create and run a site like this (site look might be changing as I add features and extend this series).

Background

I’ve a simple web site over at scriptinstall4free. It runs on a lightweight CMS called sNews. While sNews is okay, there were few times when I write an entry and it would just disappear. Also it was very limited in what it can do. So I started looking for a CMS and Joomla was what first came to my mind. I’ve used it in the past and it’s a decent system - not too basic like sNews, not too complex like Typo3. I also checked out Drupal and saw some of the sites that were built using it. Drupal appears to be a top class CMS: code-wise, documentation-wise, community-wise. Drupal’s power comes at a cost though: It isn’t as easy as Joomla to figure out initially. But once you do, the possibilities are endless.

So, join me as I install Drupal, learn how to use it and collect useful Drupal resources on my way to create a simple new site at
http://www.scriptinstall4free.com/drupal. Once the site is reasonably okay, I shall replace the current one at
http://www.scriptinstall4free.com/ with it.

Let’s get started. Shall we?

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