Setting up your content management system

So we’ve chosen a content management system – in my case I chose Drupal, but even if you’ve chosen Wordpress, or another product read on, as the same basics apply in terms of what we need to do to set the CMS up to work for us. I’ll lay this out with general suggestions, but then go into Drupal detail where it’s appropriate to do so.
All of the CMS’ will take you straight to a starter page once they are loaded on your server, which will then put you through some basic steps needed. The first thing will be to create your user and password, and you will be the administrator of the site, with full privileges.

Drupal Detail:
Drupal will take you to a screen where you can set your new password, although it will have issued a generated one for you already.

Once your site is loaded, you should take it offline, so that people aren’t coming to it while you are in the midst of changes – most CMS’ will offer this facility and allow you to customize the page people then see.

Drupal Detail:
Access the Administer Menu and then site maintenance and you can take the site offline and customize the page people land at. Try not to log out until you put the site back on line, although if you do, you can log back in by typing the url http://www.yoursite.com/ ?q=user and don’t change the word user, actually type “user” there. This will bring you back to the log in screen.
Now you are offline, it’s time to play with the themes on your new site. All CMS’ come with a choice of themes, so play around with them until you find one you like the look of. Theme simply controls the look of the site. If you are not happy with the preloaded themes, do a web search for more – you can download literally hundreds for the popular CMS’.

Drupal Detail:
Choose Administer then themes to view the options that are preloaded, change them and see what they look like. If you want to download a theme from a Drupal or other website, download it first to your desktop, then you will need to upload the theme file to your server. How you do this depends on how your host works. With some you will need to unzip the file and upload it via an FTP program. As you know, I am with www.servage.net and their system makes life very easy for me. By selecting the online file manager from within my Servage control panel, I can upload the whole folder in zipped form. Once it’s there, I can select unzip, and then untar, and the whole thing is ready to go. Whenever you upload to the server, make sure you put the uploaded file in the right place – in this example, it needs to go in the folder marked “Themes”.
Having selected and enabled the theme you want, you can now upload an image to be used as your logo, to replace the system logo which will be on your site. Most CMS’ will allow you to do this somewhere in the control panel, but you can also find the image currently being used on your server files and simply replace it.

Drupal Detail:
Look in your server files and find themes, then the theme folder for the one you have selected. There will be a file called logo.png – all you need to do is overwrite that file with your new one. You’ll need to save whatever image you are using first as a .png file, and you can do that online here: http://www.pictureresize.org/online-images-converter.html

Now this next part really only affects Drupal, as most other systems are set up to do this anyway. But the way Drupal set up, it will assign come pretty odd URL’s to each post, using terms like node and query and having questions marks all over the place. Not only are these harder for search engines to find, but it makes giving someone else a URL to follow quite hard and almost impossible to remember. You may have noticed on my site that the URL’s use the title of the post. In order to achieve this I have “enabled clean URL’s” and I have added two modules (add ons available for users of Drupal) called “Path-Auto” and “Token”.

Let’s take a step back for a moment, and talk about “modules”. Drupal calls them modules, some CMS’ call them widgets and there are other names as well. Basically, these are add-ons you can put onto your site, which add functionality. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands available, which can help you to put adverts on your site, add RRS feeds, allow you to create photo galleries and many, many other things. Just search for “Drupal Modules” or go and look at www.drupal.com or the relevant site for your CMS.

Drupal Detail:
I’m now going to cover how you upload a new module to your Drupal installation, because once you’ve mastered this, a whole new world beckons for you!
Find the module you require and make sure you select the one compatible with your version of Drupal. If you want to know which version you are running, go to “administer”, then “site status” report. Download the module to your PC, and then upload it to your server as we did with the theme, only this time upload it to the folder called “modules”. Once it’s there, unzip and untar it and then when you visit “administer” and “modules” you will be able to “enable” the new module. When you click “administer” again, you’ll see your new module and will be able to configure it to work how you want.

Once you’ve uploaded “Path-Auto” and “Token” enable them both, and I would suggest you leave all the configuration settings as they come.
With these two modules on board, the system will automatically assign a URL using the title of each post you make. But first we have to enable clean URL’s, and you’ll find a button called just that in the “administer” menu.

Once you’re there, you’ll see a tab marked “Run clean URL test” and if the test runs successfully, the enable button will be available, click it and your done!
You now know how to upload a module to Drupal, so I’m going to assume that you will now go and select the ones you want, upload them and start using them!
You can view the modules I’ve added so far HERE together with a brief explanation of what each does.

Read the backgroound to this blog here

Find out about choosing a domain name and host for you blog here

Learn about choosing a content management system here