Drupal is one of the popular platforms which let users easily publish, manage and orgnize rich contents on the web. It is very similiar to Wordpress.

Personally, I have never heard of it before last month. I started with a new web site project last month and I was supposed to use drupal to build it.  Due to the blogish looking of Drupal’s default theme, my first task was to figure out how can customize the theme as our designer designed. After a while of searching on the internet, I realized that it is quite generic to do so in Drupal. What I needed to do was copy one of the themes that come along with Drupal to the folder sites& where my subsite is located.  Then I needed to change some information in .info file and that will do it for a clean start! After I have done those all, in the admin panel of my site, I was able to enable and choose my customized theme.

One thing that needs to be mentioned is the plugin modules of Drupal. To make things a lot easier,  there are some plugins that I really recommand to install. For example, views module, filterbynodetype, webform,  block theme, block css, markdown and etc. Those modules would do a great help for your implementing.

Customzation in Drupal in gernal is fairly flexiable, web pages are defined by page temple, every content is defined as a “node” in the system which are controled by its template too. All those templates can be modified, for instance, by different node type or pages. (Thanks for the help of necessary modules.) To be able to have more control of the site, one file is quite important. One can create a tempalte.php file in the custom theme folder in which can write functions that overwrite some of Drupal’s default functions, such as function for rendering HTML element like table and list. This is a pretty neat way to add extra info as custom wishes.

Unfortunately that web site took me almost an entire month to finish and that was due to the unfimilarness  of Drupal. A lot of time that I spent was to find helpful modules and the customization. And I still think what I have discovered is just a tip of an iceberg, but I would like to know more about it later on. Please let me know if you have some questions about it and I really would like to discuss with you guys.

Recent Entries

• First but the best birthday party in Sweden!
• Stop motion movie to Shunshun
• Quick release of Randomlunch.se
• Passing parameters to event handler functions
• Mouseover and mouseout problem
• 最近心情不好。。
• …………………..
• 缘分~~
• First touch of Drupal
• New life? Different life? My own life!

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 11th, 2009 at 6:09 pm and is filed under geeky stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.