Book Image

Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, and Community Websites

By : David Mercer
Book Image

Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, and Community Websites

By: David Mercer

Overview of this book

<p>Drupal is one of the most popular content management systems on the internet. Based on PHP/MySQL, its power and flexibility combined with its exceptional design mean it is already on the way to becoming the de facto standard for CMS Websites. Drupal’s modular design and structured source code make it both highly flexible and easily extended and modified. Drupal is extremely scalable, making it ideal for both a simple personal website as well as an industrial strength commercial or institutional web presence.<br /> <br /> Drupal is a model open source project in that it has a large, friendly community of people who contribute to the project in various ways.&nbsp; Drupal is not only free and easy to use, but this community provides on going mutual support.<br /> <br /> Drupal’s power means choosing an initial pathway can be daunting. The flexibility and power of its content management features mean the right approach needs to be taken.&nbsp; This book takes you from initial set up through site design and creation in a series of carefully structured steps. While there are a few advanced topics that are beyond the scope of the book, all of the core stages of creating a website using Drupal are covered in detail.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Drupal
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Working with Blocks


As we saw briefly in Chapter 2, blocks contain information or related data that is visible in various places around the site—depending on where you choose to show them. Blocks are often generated by modules, but it is also possible to create them manually. Since many modules generate blocks automatically, it is always wise to pay the blocks section a visit whenever a new module has been enabled, because chances are that you have some new settings to play with.

OK, we know what blocks are, so what are we discussing in this section? Well, when we talk about working with blocks, what we are really saying is"How do we want to present the functionality of the site to the user?" Naturally, everyone should strive to make a striking and unique site, and layout configuration is a big part of that—especially since it governs how functionality is organized on the site's interface.

Keep in mind at all times that the overriding factors, which govern the way you set things up when it...