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After setting up a handful of Drupal powered sites, it has formed a habit on setting up the different modules and themes that put the site on a ‘ready to go live’ or ‘ready to build upon’ state. This basically involves going through a set of items and options in the Drupal administration area and setting them up.

In this article, I will be assuming a Drupal 5 installation. The Drupal 6 would be having what are called ‘install profiles’ that will actually ask few questions and setup these basic setups for you.

Site name, description, mission, copyright info

Once Drupal site is installed and the first user (the super-user) is created, login with it and proceed to ‘Home › Administer › Site configuration > Site Information’ and fill in the details like the site name, slogan, mission statement, and copyrithg info. I like to put this one before setting up anything else, because once these details are put, it lets me identify the Drupal instance easily by the website name instead of the default ‘Drupal’ title.

Status Report

This step lays down the crucial baseline and ensures that whatever you build and setup over it need not be rolled back. Go to ‘Home › Administer › Logs > Status Report’ and fix any errors that it might indicate. Usually, the ‘files’ folder is not created, and you would need to create it in the installation directory with proper read-write-execute permissions.

Basic theme selection and customization

Even if I am going to apply a custom theme to the website later, it helps to add direction to the website development by customizing the default themes. Go to ‘Home › Administer › Site building > Themes’ and play around with all the options. Choose a particular theme, and customize it. If you chose Garland theme, then you will be able to tweak the color sheme with the help of ‘Color’ module. You will also be able to switch off the logo or replace it with a custom one here.

URLs

This is a crucial first step in building a search engine friendly as well as user friendly website. At ‘Home › Administer › Site configuration > Clean URLs’, enable the Clean URLs option. You may need to give write access to the .htaccess file while doing this. At this point, you may have trouble with the cookies where it might show an ‘Access Denied’ message even if you are logged in. Just clear the browser cookies and cache and login again. Next, proceed to ‘Home › Administer › Site building > Modules’ and activate the ‘Path’ module if it is not already activated. You are now prepared to install the custom module - Pathauto.

User Management

Depending on how many users would be actually using the site, you might want to consider creating member groups for the different users. You will be able to do this at ‘Home › Administer › User management > Roles’. By default, there will be two roles: anonymous user and authenticated user. If it is a single user website (in case you want to setup a blog website), then you need not perform anything. Else create new roles. You can proceed to ‘Home › Administer › User management > Access Control’ and fine tune the different permissions for different types of roles.

Taxonomy

This feature, which happens to be the strenght of Drupal, is often looked to be quite complex by the first time users. (By users, I mean who use Drupal as a CMS to setup a webstite - not those who visit and use the website). In the begining, for sake of understanding, assume it to be just categories. With Taxonomy, you can define the different categories, the different types of content can be put into. By default, you are able to create two types of content (or node as it is called in Drupal) - story and page. Page is used for static-type content like about pages, and FAQ pages. Story type nodes are basically for articles. You can define different sets of categories of these types of nodes, or make a common set of categories. A set of categories is called vocabulary. I like to create a basic vocabulary before even I start to create content, and add few terms (categories) in them. You can do this at ‘Home › Administer › Content management > Categories’. If this option is not visible, you may need to activate the ‘Taxonomy’ module at ‘Home › Administer › Site building > Modules’.

Stub content and menu

I create some stub pages for About and similar pages ( ‘Home › Create content > Page’ ), and then add them to the primary links (or menu). To edit the primary links menu, go to ‘Home › Administer › Site building > Menu’ and add links to the Primary Links Menu.

The above steps are what I do for almost all the Drupal setups I work on. From this point on, it depends on what kind of website you want to create. Most of it can be achieved by using the core modules that come out of the box - they just need to be activated and setup. We will look at the different core modules in depth in the next post.