Poplar ProductivityWare Articles:
Drupal Cheat Sheet
by Jennifer Hodgdon

I'm pretty impressed with the open-source web-site content management system called Drupal, but when I started using it to build web sites, I found it pretty difficult to figure out. This surprised me, because I was already an experienced web developer, including being a PHP/MySQL web programmer (those are the technologies that Drupal is built on), and I was also quite involved in the development community of WordPress (another web site content management system, focused on blogging). I felt like I needed a "cheat sheet" to get me going: an article that would quickly get me familiar with the basics of Drupal, help me figure out how to build a Drupal-based web site in the "right" way, and give me some idea of which of the hundreds of contributed modules out there were the best ones to use on my sites.

But I didn't find a "cheat sheet". Instead, I spent a lot of time reading all sorts of documentation and articles (many of which assumed basic knowledge of Drupal that I didn't necessarily have), and attending meetings and events put on by the Seattle Drupal Users Group to absorb the collective knowledge of people who had been building web sites with Drupal for longer than I had been. Eventually, I learned enough to build pretty complex web sites, so to save other web developers the same effort, I thought I would create this article. To get the most out of this article, you should be a web developer who has built at least plain-HTML web sites, and understands the process of registering a domain name, setting up hosting, creating HTML files, and uploading them to the server. My hope is that after you read this article, you will be ready to build a web site in Drupal, and at least know where to go for more information. (If not, you can hire Poplar ProductivityWare to set up a Drupal-based site for you.)

Sorry about the length of this article, but building a site with Drupal is fairly involved!

Here's what this article contains:

Why Use Drupal?

Drupal is an example of a web site content management system, which is a software package that can be used as a tool to build the pages of a web site. In Drupal, most of the text-based content (i.e. the text on your site's pages) is stored in a database (typically MySQL) on your web server. Drupal itself is a set of PHP scripts that runs on your web server. Drupal allows site administrators to create and edit content; allows site administrators to change the menus, URLs, categories, and other configurational aspects of the site; has a comprehensive system to manage users and accounts; and allows visitors to view and interact with your web site. All of the text content for the site is stored in a MySQL database behind the scenes; images and other media files are typically stored on the server rather than in the database.

The main advantage of using a content management system, instead of building a web site with HTML files, is that it is much easier to edit the content, add new pages, and re-configure menus and navigation. Another advantage is that the content of the site is separated from the presentation, so if you want to change the overall look of the site, you will not have to go back and edit all your content pages -- you just change the template.

The main advantages of Drupal over other content management systems are that it is free, open-source software; it uses the ubiquitous PHP/MySQL technology as its platform; it has a very large community of users, so bugs are found and fixed quickly; there are many web developers available to build Drupal-based sites; it has a huge number of free add-on modules to cover most of the functionality that web sites need; and if you don't find a module for the functionality you need, you can write your own add-on module (or hire Poplar ProductivityWare to write one for you).

There are some advantages to WordPress too. If you are building a fairly simple web site that is basically a brochure, with perhaps a news, articles, or blogging component, you don't need all the functionality of Drupal, and I would instead recommend using WordPress as the content management platform. It shares many of the advantages of Drupal (it's open-source, based on PHP/MySQL, extensible, and backed by a very active developer and user community), but it's a lot simpler to use and set up -- you won't need a "cheat sheet" to figure it out: pretty much just install it, find a theme you like, and you're ready to go.

If you are interested in other content management systems, check out the short reviews in our article on resources for web programmers.

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Glossary of Drupal Concepts

This section contains a glossary of the Drupal terms and concepts that you need to understand before reading the rest of this article. For a more comprehensive introduction to Drupal, check out the Overview pages from the Drupal Getting Starting Guide on drupal.org.

Paths: Each page on your web site, including the built-in administration pages you will use to build and modify your site behind the scenes, has a path, or URL, associated with it. Drupal typically refers to pages on the site by just the suffix part of the path -- excluding the base URL of the site. For instance, on your site, the Create Content administrative page might have a URL something like www.example.com/node/add, or it might be more like www.example.com/sub/dir/?q=node/add, but in either case, the Drupal path would be just "node/add". In the rest of this article, the URLs of administrative pages will be given by just their path suffix, so you'll need to figure out how that relates to your own site. The paths given below are correct for the 5.x version of Drupal; I'll try to update them for later versions as needed.

Content types and nodes: In Drupal, pieces of content that make up your web site belong to particular content types. For example, a typical static web page has content type "Story", and a new topic of discussion in a forum has content type "Forum Topic". Each of these content types in Drupal is a specialized version of the basic content type, which is called a "node" in Drupal. A basic node has a title, a body, a unique ID number, a content type designation, a record of who created it and when, and some other settings associated with it. Other content types have additional fields and types of information associated with them; you can even create your own content types. You may hear people say, in regards to Drupal, that "everything is a node," which is a good way to remember that most of the content in Drupal is stored in content types that are variations of the basic node content type. However, there are certainly exceptions: not all the content that you can display on Drupal web pages is actually stored in nodes. You can create new content by visiting path "node/add" on your site, and you can manage and edit existing content by visiting path "admin/content/node" on your site.

Comments: If you have the optional core "Comment" module turned on (see below for module terminology), some of the nodes on your web site (such as forum topics and blog articles) can be set up to allow visitors to the site to comment on them. In Drupal, comments are stored separately from the node they refer to, and typically displayed on the same web page as their node. Comments are one example of content on your site that is not a node.

Users and Roles: Everyone who interacts with your web site, from the visitors to the administrators, is considered a "user" in Drupal. Users can be given permission to access certain content and perform certain actions on your site; these permissions are granted by assigning users to "roles," and defining authorization permissions for each role. When you first install Drupal, there are three roles defined. The most basic is called "anonymous user", which corresponds to a web site visitor who has not logged in. The next role is "authenticated user", which corresponds to a person who has logged in to a user account on your web site. There is also an implicit role that I like to call the "super administrator": the first user account that you set up when you install Drupal is given an internal ID number of 1, and that user account always has permission to perform all administrative actions on the site (although this role is not really defined explicitly). A user with sufficient permission can define new roles for your site, create new user accounts, and assign different permissions to the roles; the screens to manage users and roles can be found at path "admin/user".

Themes: Drupal, like most good content management systems, has a strong separation between the content of your site and how that content is presented. This allows you to define many web pages in the administrative back end, and ensure that they all conform to your web site's basic design (e.g. header, footer, sidebars, color scheme) when they are presented to a visitor. The mechanism for ensuring that the pages are presented in a consistent manner, and for defining the style and design of your site's pages, is through the use of a Drupal "theme", which is a set of web scripts, images, and style files that you will upload to your web server. You can have more than one theme installed on your site, but only one theme is active for any one page view, and most sites are set up to allow the use of only a single theme. The section below on themes has more information on this topic.

Modules: The core functionality of Drupal is pretty basic -- it's more of a framework than a complete system for creating a web site. The Drupal framework can be extended by installing and activating add-on "modules", which are sets of PHP scripts that modify or extend the functionality of the core Drupal framework. The basic Drupal distribution contains several "optional core modules", which are modules that come with the distribution, but are not turned on by default. You can also download and install "contributed modules", which are modules written by members of the Drupal community. Finally, if you are a PHP/MySQL programmer (or hire one), you can also write your own custom modules. Most Drupal-based sites will make use of at least a few optional and contributed modules. The section below on modules has more information on this topic.

Menus: In the administration section of your Drupal site, if you have the optional core "Menu" module turned on, you can create and modify various "menus" (path: "admin/build/menu"), which are basically just ordered collections of links to pages on your site. Some menus are pre-defined; you can also create your own menus. Drupal will only display a given menu item to a user who is authorized to view the page it links to, so you can add items to menus without worrying about whether they're applicable to all roles on your site. (By the way, menus are not nodes.) See the Creating a Menu Structure page on drupal.org for more information.

Blocks: Once you have defined menus, you will need to tell Drupal where you want them to appear. To do this, you will go to the "Blocks" administration page (path: "admin/build/block") on your site, choose a particular theme, and then define which "blocks" should appear in which areas of the theme (such as the header, footer, or sidebar sections). Blocks in Drupal include menus (pre-defined or ones that you have defined) and special blocks that are defined by your add-on modules. In addition to placing blocks, the "configure" link next to each block lets you restrict the block so that only certain roles can see it, or so that it only appears on certain pages of your site. See the Block Configuration page on drupal.org for more information.

Taxonomy: The optional core "Taxonomy" module allows you to categorize your web site -- for instance, to create systems of categories or tags for your site's content. You can limit certain "vocabularies" (or groups of related categories) to certain content types, and have other vocabularies that apply site-wide. See the Taxonomies page on drupal.org for more information. The path for the taxonomy administration page is "admin/content/taxonomy".

Weight: Many Drupal administration screens use the concept of "weight" to define an order within a collection of items. For instance, when you create a menu, each menu item gets a "weight" number. When the menu is displayed, the "lighter" items (the ones with the smallest or most negative numbers) "float" to the top of the menu, and the "heavier" items (the ones with the largest or most positive numbers) "sink" to the bottom of the menu.

Drupal's Directory Structure (directory is another word for a "folder" of files) is as follows:

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Site Building Checklist and Pitfalls

This section contains an overview of site building in Drupal: what order to do things in, where to find more information on each step, and some pitfalls you can avoid. Here are the steps I suggest following, in this order, when creating a Drupal-based web site:

  1. Plan your site: See the Site Planning section below for more information.
  2. Decide which Drupal version you want to use. You will first need to decide on the "major version" of Drupal: 4.x, 5.x, 6.x, etc. My recommendation is that you use the most recent major version, unless it is so new that most modules don't yet have compatible versions for it (you can find this out by visiting the Modules list page on drupal.org, and scanning the Version sections to see what Drupal versions each module is compatible with; for instance, in February 2008, Drupal 6.0 was released, but most of the modules were not yet updated to 6.0, so I would have chosen 5.x as my major version). Once you have decided on a major version, you will probably want to use the latest release of that version, because it will have the latest bug fixes and security updates. There is also a page on drupal.org that discusses how to choose which version to use.
  3. Download the zip file for the Drupal version you are installing, from the download Drupal page on drupal.org.
  4. Unzip and upload the Drupal files on your web server, and run the install script. This is described in great detail in the Getting Started Guide on drupal.org - go to that link, choose your Drupal version, and read the Installation Guide sections. (If there is not yet a Getting Started Guide for the major version you have chosen, it might be time to revisit that decision and go back to the previous major version.)
  5. Locate and install the contributed modules you will need for the site's functionality. (Don't activate the modules yet -- just upload them to your site.) See the modules section below for more information on how to choose and install the modules you will need. Important: when you add a contributed module to your site, you need to add it to the "sites" directory, not the main "modules" directory! See the note above on Drupal's directory structure.
  6. Locate and install the theme you want to use for your site, or at least the theme you plan to use as a starting point for customization. See the themes section below for more information on themes. Important: when you add a theme to your site, you need to add it to the "sites" directory, not the main "themes" directory! See the note above on Drupal's directory structure.
  7. Set up a time zone and basic site information. The time zone settings are at path admin/settings/date-time, and the basic site information is entered at path admin/settings/site-information. Important: Don't fill in the mission for the site yet. The reason is that if the optional "Drupal" module is enabled, and your site has a mission filled in, that will trigger the site to appear in a directory on drupal.org, and you probably don't want that to happen until your site is ready for public viewing.
  8. If you are using the (recommended) Admin Role module (see modules below), enable this module and set it up, before enabling any other modules.
  9. Enable the Path module (see modules below), and get Clean URLs working (Clean URLs are at path admin/settings/clean-urls). The Path module and Clean URLs setting are what allow you to have "clean" URLs without a question mark or the word "node" in them on your site; for example, instead of URLs like www.example.com/?q=node/3, you can have URLs more like www.example.com/about. If you find that the Clean URLs page gives you an error message, and says your site is not configured properly for clean URLs, you can probably follow the instructions there to fix it. In particular, for sites I have built, I have found some or all of the following changes to be necessary to get Clean URLs working on some web hosts:
    • In the site's settings.php file, define a base URL: search for a line that starts with $base_url, remove the "#" (comment) character at the beginning, and edit so that it points to the base URL of your Drupal installation (for instance, 'http://www.example.com/drupal').
    • In the site's .htaccess file, remove the "#" character on the line that has "RewriteBase" in it, and make it say "RewriteBase /" (without the quotes).
    • If your Drupal installation is in a sub-directory of the base URL of the site (e.g. example.com/drupal), then find the section several lines down in the .htaccess file that is marked as dealing with URLs of the form 'index.php?q=x', and change the line that starts with "RewriteRule" so that it points to the actual location of index.php (e.g. in this example, replace index.php with /drupal/index.php in that line).
  10. Enable other modules needed by your site (see modules below).
  11. Create content types for your site (assuming you are using the CCK module; path: admin/content/types). See the planning section below for more information on content types.
  12. Enter at least some sample content, at least one item of each of your custom content types, and place-holders for the main static pages of your site (path: node/add).
  13. Create views, menus, and panels for your site (assuming you are using the Views, Menus, and Panels modules; paths: admin/build/views, admin/build/menu, admin/build/panel). Also, configure the blocks (path: admin/build/blocks). For more information, see the site planning section below (views and panels), the glossary section on blocks above, and the glossary section on menus above.
  14. Customize your theme, if necessary (see the themes section below).
  15. Finalize your content (path: admin/content/node).
  16. Check your site for security and integrity, and you're done! Some considerations:
    • Backups: you will probably want to schedule regular backups of both the MySQL database behind your web site, and the uploaded files (which should be stored in the "files" directory of your Drupal installation). You can use the "Backup and Migrate" module for database backups (see the modules section below.
    • Configuration Warnings: When you visit the main Drupal administration page on your site (path: admin), you may see a red warning message across the top. If so, you should probably check the status report (path: admin/logs/status) see what is wrong, and fix it, because some of the problems the status report lists are security risks.
    • Permissions: Verify that the different roles you have set up have the correct permissions on the Configure Permissions screen (path: admin/user/access).
    • Modules: There are also some Drupal security-related modules available on drupal.org; you might browse through that list and see if any of them sound useful for your site
    • Software Updates: Periodically check for security updates for Drupal and the modules you are using. You can be notified of security updates; see the Promoting Drupal Security page on drupal.org for more information.
    • Site Feature Updates: Once you have Drupal installed and customized for your site, updating and adding to the content is straightforward in the administration interface. However, sometimes you will need to add a new feature or functionality to the site, or modify how a current feature works. This can be difficult, because you probably don't want to break the "live" site while you're testing the new feature. A strategy for making such updates:
      1. Back up your live site's database, and use this to build a test version on another server. All you should need to do to use one Drupal site's database contents for another site is to create the appropriate settings.php file.
      2. Follow the instructions on this drupal.org page in the "Manually port content updated/added after copy to test DB" section, to track content revisions on your live site.
      3. Make the configuration changes on your test site. These will normally involve creating or modifying content types, views, and panels. If you are also installing or updating modules as well, you will eventually need to upload the same files to the live server!
      4. When the test site is working properly, find all revisions to content on the live site since your backup, and make the same changes to the test site manually (see article referenced above).
      5. Back up the live database again. Back up the test database, and use this backup to overwrite the live database.
    • See the Installation, Migration, and Backups page on drupal.org for more suggestions.

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Site Planning

Before you build your site, it is important to have a plan for the following aspects of it:

Once you have a plan for the design, functionality, and user interaction of your site, the next planning step is to figure out what you'll need to add to and customize in Drupal to achieve your plan. For most web sites, this means a combination of custom content types, views, panels, a theme, and modules. I'll discuss the first three here; recommended modules are listed in the modules section below, and theme customization is discussed in the themes section below.

Custom Content Types

Many web sites can be best built using custom content types, which are nodes (see glossary section on nodes above) with added data fields. For instance, in a site I built for a roofing company, I created a custom content type "Material" that contained fields pertaining to roofing materials, such as an image of the material, the name of the manufacturer, and a link to the manufacturer's web site. Another custom content type, "Customer", contained information about a customer: before and after photos, the house's address, the roofing material used (a reference to a "Material" node), a way to specify that this is the "featured" customer, etc. The Content Construction Kit (CCK) module, and probably one or more CCK sub-modules, which give you more data type choices, must be installed and activated to allow creation of custom content types (path: admin/content/types). See the Content Construction Kit Handbook on drupal.org for more information on how to create content types with CCK.

Views

Once you have created custom content types appropriate for your site, you will probably want to use the Views module to display your custom content types. Views are either full pages or blocks (see glossary section on blocks above) that contain one or more nodes; you can specify various filters to define which nodes are included, and choose to display the included nodes as complete nodes, tables, lists, or teasers. You can also define "filters" for your views, which allow site visitors to restrict the view to subsets of the nodes, and you can define "arguments" so that depending on the path used to access the view, different subsets of nodes are displayed. For more information on how to create views, see the Views Documentation page on drupal.org.

As an example of views, on the roofing company site mentioned above, I created a "Materials Gallery" view that showed all the Material nodes as complete nodes (with a special theme function that arranged them in a 2-column table), and three different views of Customer nodes: a Featured Customer block that picked out the featured Customer and displayed it, a zip code-filtered page that allowed site visitors to search for customers in their zip code, and a material-filtered view that allowed site visitors to search for photos of houses roofed with certain materials. One other useful feature of views is that you can also define permissions for each view (which roles can view them and whether users can filter them).

Panels

Once you have content types and views defined, you may find your site needs a couple of "panels" pages. Most of the pages on your web site will follow the general layout defined by your theme, which is normally a header section at the top, a footer at the bottom, left and/or right sidebars, and a content section in the middle. But often, a few pages need to have a different layout. For example, maybe the home page needs to have 4 sections, arranged in a 2x2 grid, in the main content pane, for News, Events, Featured Product, and the weather in Toledo. The Panels module allows you to do that (note: you probably want to use Panels Version 2, even if it is still in a "beta test" version). Often, Views with Filters and Arguments are what goes in panels, and with Panels Version 2, you can even use different portions of the panel-page path to feed into different panels as path arguments. See the (in progress) Panels 2 Documentation page on drupal.org for more information. One other note: with some coding, a Panels page can also override the main layout of a theme (for instance, you might not want the usual sidebar on the home page). There's a page on the Seattle Drupal group about this.

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Themes

This section contains information on Drupal themes, including how they work, where to find new themes, and how to install them.

How Themes Work

As outlined above in the introduction and glossary sections, Drupal uses a "theme" system to separate the content of your web site from the way that content is presented. Basically, when someone requests a particular URL on your site, Drupal figures out what the Drupal path is for that URL, gets the content from the database for the blocks (see glossary section on blocks, above) on the page, as well as the main content section, and sends this content to the "template engine" you are using. The template engine then figures out which theme functions and/or files are needed to render the content in your theme, and uses them to convert the content into an HTML page (or in some cases, an RSS/XML page or other format), and sends this out across the network to the site visitor's browser.

There are four main options for template engines in Drupal; each theme is specific to a particular template engine, because the files needed for a theme vary depending on what template engine it is based on. The main engines are:

The rest of this article will assume you want to use the PHPTemplate engine.

Finding Themes

When you install Drupal, you will find that it gives you several themes to choose from. You can customize the colors of some of these themes (if you turn on the optional core Colors module), as well as the logo image and in some cases, text appearing in headers, footers, and sidebars. You can also change the blocks and menus for these themes (see glossary section on blocks and the glossary section on menus above). However, for many sites, you will probably want to find a different theme, or create a custom theme. My advice, if you want to have a customized look for a site, is to start by finding a theme whose structure is reasonably close to what you are looking for, and then modify the CSS styles for the theme, and possibly add some custom theme programming until it is what you want.

You can search for themes on the Themes page on drupal.org. When you find one that you think you might like, make sure it is based on the PHPTemplate theme engine (it probably is, unless it specifically says it isn't), and make sure it is available for the version of Drupal you are running. You might also want to check its licensing conditions, and make sure you are willing to abide by them. Then download the theme, and see below for how to install it.

If you are planning on creating a customized theme, I recommend starting with either Box_grey, Zen, or one of the themes that is distributed with the core Drupal files.

Installing and Activating Themes

The Getting Started Guide on drupal.org has more detailed instructions on how to install themes, but I'll outline the steps here. Important: see the note above on Drupal's directory structure, in regards to where to install themes.

To install and activate a theme:

  1. Download the zip file for the theme and unzip it onto your local computer. It should unzip into its own directory, named after the theme. (If your starting point for customization is one of the themes distributed with Drupal, you can find its files in the Drupal zip file, in a subdirectory of "themes".)
  2. If you are planning to customize this theme extensively for your site, you might want to rename it. To do this, change the directory name, and also edit the theme name in the style.css file of the theme.
  3. Upload the directory of files to your web host, creating them as a sub-directory of either sites/all/themes or a site-specific sub-directory such as sites/mysite/themes.
  4. To enable the theme, visit the Themes administration page (path: admin/build/themes). Find your theme in the list. You can enable it by checking the Enabled box; you can also make it the default theme by clicking the Default option. You may also want to disable some of the other themes at this time. Click the Save Configuration button at the bottom of the screen, and if you chose this new theme as the default theme, you should see an immediate change in the styles and layout of your page (unless you have defined a separate administration theme).

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Modules

This section contains brief instructions on how to install add-on modules on a Drupal site, as well as some recommendations on which modules to use. To find modules not listed here, visit the Modules list on drupal.org.

Installing and Activating Modules

The Getting Started Guide on drupal.org has more detailed instructions on how to install modules, but I'll outline the steps here. Important: see the note above on Drupal's directory structure, in regards to where to install modules.

To install and activate a module:

Modules Most Sites Will Need

This section lists a few very-highly-recommended modules that most Drupal-based sites probably will need or ought to consider.

Modules Useful for Some Sites

In this section, I list modules that I wouldn't consider to be essential for most Drupal sites, but that are recommended if you need their particular functionality on a particular site. I haven't necessarily used all of them myself, but they are all modules that have been at least recommended by people I respect.

Developer Modules

This section lists modules that are useful primarily while you are trying to build and/or debug a site, modules, and/or themes. Most of these modules should probably be disabled once the site is released, as some of them will slow the site down (and in general, the more modules you have enabled, the slower the site will run, since they all get loaded whenever someone visits any page on your site).

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Further Reading

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