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

Themes


The use of themes makes Drupal exceptionally flexible when it comes to working with the site's interface. Because the functionality of the site is by and large decoupled from the presentation of the site, it is quite easy to chop and change the look, without having to worry about affecting the functionality at all. This is obviously a very useful aspect because it frees you up to experiment however you please knowing that, if worst comes to worst, you can reset the default settings and start from scratch.

You can think of a theme as a template for your site, which you can modify in order to achieve the look and feel you want. Of course, different themes have wildly varying attributes; so it is important to find the theme that most closely resembles what you are looking for in order to reduce the amount of work you need to do.

Accordingly, the first task we need to complete is…

Choosing a Base Theme

By default, Drupal ships with a few default themes and there are quite a few more available...