Website Designing using Drupal

by
Aditi Maurya (2014005)
Ishita Verma (2014051)
Nitika Saran (2014068)


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To make a website, one needs to write long, complicated scripts in multiple languages like HTML, CSS, PHP, etc. But with tools like Drupal, someone with no knowledge of computer programming or coding can create a visually appealing, interactive and powerful website easily.

Content Management System


Drupal is a Content Management System (CMS), a software platform that aids in the management of content on a Website. Such an application serves as a central repository containing documents, movies, pictures, phone numbers, scientific data. They can be used for storing, controlling, revising, semantically enriching and publishing documentation.

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CMS has two elements:

a)Content management application (CMA) is the front-end user interface that allows a user, even with limited expertise, to add, modify and remove content from a Web site without the intervention of a Webmaster.

b)Content delivery application (CDA) compiles that information and updates the Web site.

With a tool like this, it’s easy to make anything from a simple homepage to a blog or even a whole social network!

In this post, we guide you through making a website of your choice using Drupal 7!

The simple set of instructions that one needs to follow are discussed here.

Install Apache, MySQL and PHP.


Your computer needs a server application to display local files as web pages. Apache is required for this purpose. MySQL is the software to create and manage your website's database, and as all drupal scripts are in php, it is an essential component of the site. All in one packages are available online, such as WAMP for Windows and LAMP for Linux. We have used WAMP.

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Install Drupal


This is a multi step process in itself. First, you need to download the Drupal zip file. Various versions of drupal are available on www.drupal.org, we have used Drupal 7.33. This comes with a default set of modules that give your website a number of basic features. You can extend Drupal by downloading more modules, according to your website's needs.

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Once you have downloaded the file, extract it to the 'www' directory of the WAMP main directory or it's equivalent in your own Apache server file, such as htdocs in XAMPP.

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Next, make sure your server is turned on and run the URL localhost/<drupal file name>, for eg. localhost/drupal-7.33 ,as we extracted it to a directory of that name.
The page will ask you to fill a set of preferences and check your file permissions. It will also set up your database and create your username and password for Drupal.
Save all preferences and click 'Set up and Install'.

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You also need to create a database for your Drupal website, phpMyAdmin is used for this purpose.

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Start Building


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A) Changing the theme:
The first thing you probably want to do is to change how your site looks.You can enable/disable themes by going to ‘Appearance’ in the main menu (Dashboard) and going to themes.

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A number of themes will already be installed and enabled.You can download more themes and save them in the ‘themes’ file in ‘drupal/sites/all’ of your server’s public directory. Some themes like Garland allow you to change colours.

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To edit other themes, you will have to edit the CSS stylesheet, in the files of the themes. We used ‘Bluez’ and edited it’s colours using CSS.

Original theme:

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Modified Theme:

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B) Adding content:

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Any instance of a content type in Drupal is called a node. By default, Drupal has two content types: Articles and Basic pages.While articles are used for frequently updated items such as a blog or a news section, Basic pages don’t change that frequently and don’t allow comments.

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You can easily add a page or article and configure it.You can decide it’s path and provide a link in the menu for it.

C) Structure:
Once you have all your content, you need to give it an appropriate layout. This section on your main menu allows you to do so through 4 options:

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  • Menus:

You can configure lists of links to different pages in your site. In most themes there is one main menu with options like home, etc.

  • Blocks:

These are literal blocks of content on your pages, such as header top, header bottom, columns, etc. You can view the block configuration for different themes in Drupal 7.

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  • Content Types:

This option allows you to configure content types and define new ones.For instance, you might have "Info" and "News flash" as two simple content types on your site, rather than just using "Article" for both.Also,contributed modules define their own content types.

  • Taxonomy:

This is a systematic way of categorising things to make it easier to sort our content and expose how each node is related to the others.This is done with vocabularies and terms, which are basically categories of your content.For example, ‘Tags’ is a default vocabulary in Drupal 7.

D) People:
One of the great features of Drupal is the ability to control how and what people can access on your site. You can set permissions for these "users" to define who can do what for Drupal core features and contributed modules. For example, you probably won't want casual visitors to edit your homepage. However, the site owner or trusted user should be able to do so.

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E) Modules:
Drupal also gives the user an added feature,modules, to allow further customization. The user can select certain modules from the list given in the modules tab and install them in the conventional way. Using modules is very popular among Drupal users as it eases off their burden of administering Drupal.

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F) Configurations:
The configuration management module enables the ability to keep track of specific configurations on a Drupal site, provides the ability to move these configurations between different environments (local, dev, qa, prod), and also move configurations between completely different sites (migrate configurations) without the use of modules with all configuration being owned by the site. The granularity of managing configuration is down to each specific configuration, rather than an entire group of configurations (feature module). This makes it easier to activate or write to file specific configurations.

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With this amount of knowledge, you can go ahead and create any website you want!!

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