Drupal
The next step is to switch from the default theme to something a little more stylish.
The first modules we're going to turn on are the ones that help us do the rest of the configuration faster. Go to Administer > Site Building > Modules and turn on these modules. (Check the boxes next to their names, then scroll all the way to the bottom and click save.)
The default settings for the Apache servers at 1&1 need to be overridden. Drupal provides a .htaccess file which takes care of most settings. You will need to modify that further to get everything working.
After setting up a php.ini file as described in this article, you need to add one more line. Drupal also requires that PHP be able to open other files on the server. This requires the fopen setting to be turned on. Open up your new php.ini file and add this line:
allow_url_fopen = On
I like the idea of the tutorial ending with a discussion of how to make a tutorial. It is really pretty straightforward, since we only need to turn on one more core module to get the basic functions.
I like to think that I'm not driven by ad dollars, but I still want people to find and read my stuff. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an interesting enough topic to get a chapter of its own.
Some modules make it easier for both search engines and people to read your site. Pathauto and Page Title help both people and robots read your site more easily. But there are two modules I dropped in specifically for SEO. They have no effect at all on the way the site looks, but make things better behind the scenes.
Drupal setup often involves running back and forth between menus, enabling one thing here so that you can configure it over there, so that you can use it in a third place. I'm not sure I've gotten it perfect, but I've tried to organize these steps to minimize backtracking.
These are the steps I took to download and install the code for the site, turning on and configuring the first modules, and doing the basic setup on my theme.
Websites should look nice. Site designers go to a lot of trouble to make websites pretty and functional at the same time. People should enjoy looking at the site, not wince because everything they look at is blinking at them and asking for money. I much prefer the internet without advertising, but the simple fact is that hosting a site, even with the cheapest hosting I could find, still costs something. With that in mind, I decided to include some ads on the site. Sorry about that.
At this point, you have downloaded the latest Drupal 6 package and the contributed modules that you want to use. You have them un-tarred and un-gzipped, and you have them running on your local machine or transferred them all to your web host of choice (or both). There are so many other tutorials covering those steps, I'm going to assume you can get that far without me.
