Basic Site Configuration

Submitted by learnbythedrop on Mon, 01/05/2009 - 21:26

Lesson Two of my special Getting Started With Drupal series of instructional videos.

This video explores the basic configuration options to consider once you have successfully installed Drupal.

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Comments

jrstark's picture
Submitted by jrstark (not verified) on Tue, 01/06/2009 - 19:38.

Much easier!

Embedding bliptv works great, had no problems watching this time. Looking forward to the theming video.

Lilbird's picture
Submitted by Lilbird (not verified) on Sun, 02/08/2009 - 02:01.

Progressive lessons

I am enjoying your tutorials and have been getting a lot out of them. It took me a while to find them and your first one saved my bacon on getting a basic site up and running locally to begin my learning process. My challenge is that I am a novice and not a programmer. That challenge became more evident with respect to a lot of Drupal documentation. It was over my head many times. I read through most of it on the Drupal Site basic level and found myself being overwhelmed and lost. Not to mention, I was bouncing all over the place.

The second is the abundance of learning tutorials out there that are not in any order and of course the listings are not always for the most recent version of Drupal. Thank you for having yours up to speed.

I finally got smart and started Goggling for your lessons by the numbers, 1, 2, 3, etc, to have a progression for ease of learning. This worked somewhat but is not always correct either. Lesson Five came up as lesson eight. It would be nice if you could have a progression of your tutorials for the novices listed on your site, beginning with lesson 1 and on up. It would help those of us in my position as novices and starting out from scratch in this Drupal world and needing a progressive learning approach.

Finally, is there something that you can do to make the videos clear when we put them in full screen? They are not always very clear in the full screen mode and sometimes pretty hard to read. The small screen doesn't lend itself to reading lot of the screen shot at all. Additionally, when you occasionally zoom in on a shot, it is in too tight and I can't see all that you are talking about. The discussion leads to items just out of sight beyond the screen edge. I think your content and manner of speaking for the presentation is great, but some of the video is hurting your presentation quality.

Thank you for what you are doing and for your assistance in my learning Drupal.

Lilbird

learnbythedrop's picture
Submitted by learnbythedrop on Sun, 02/08/2009 - 08:40.

Tutorial Progression

Thanks for taking the time to provide some feedback. Here are some responses that hopefully will help to make things clearer.

"It would be nice if you could have a progression of your tutorials"

The Getting Started With Drupal Series follow a defined progression and the best way to follow that is to bookmark the page at http://learnbythedrop.com/gettingstarted where those lessons are listed in order from top to bottom. The other video lessons are really in no particular order. I just think a particular video is a good idea and I record it.

"Finally, is there something that you can do to make the videos clear when we put them in full screen?"

The free embedded and QuickTime downloadable versions of the videos (for the most part) are encoded at 480X320 resolution which is geared toward the iPhone or iPod Touch. The largest, sharpest versions of the lessons are the premium versions which have the same resolution as the original recording (usually 1024x768) and can be purchased individually for $2.99.

Lilbird's picture
Submitted by Lilbird (not verified) on Mon, 02/09/2009 - 16:07.

Found the listing

Thanks Rob, I found the list at the link you provided, (http://learnbythedrop.com/gettingstarted). This was just what I had been looking for.

I would suggest you put a link to this particular page on your Home page or even put the list itself there. I searched several ways throughout your site after you gave me the link and never got a hit on this page. Having this sooner would have been a big assist to me in searching your out your progressive lessons. You have a great progression of videos that is a big assist to the us novices and I would like to see you be even more popular among that group.

Thank You Again!

Lilbird

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 02/28/2009 - 00:20.

thank you !

thank you !

Steve's picture
Submitted by Steve (not verified) on Tue, 06/30/2009 - 18:27.

HTTP request status

Hi, I'm a noob and have been going step by step with you, after install, on my admin page I get a status report error:
HTTP request status Fails
Your system or network configuration does not allow Drupal to access web pages, resulting in reduced functionality. This could be due to your webserver configuration or PHP settings, and should be resolved in order to download information about available updates, fetch aggregator feeds, sign in via OpenID, or use other network-dependent services.

I'm having trouble resolving this.
Win xp pro sp3
drupal 6.12
wampServer Version 2.0 Bundle included the following:
PHP 5.2.9-2
Apache 2.2.11
MySQL 5.1.33

learnbythedrop's picture
Submitted by learnbythedrop on Wed, 07/01/2009 - 21:34.

Most Likely A Conflict

This is most likely a conflict with something else that is running or installed. SQL Server can cause problems running Wampserver. So can aggressive firewall software I believe. The Wampserver forums are really the best place to get help with these types of problems.

cup's picture
Submitted by cup (not verified) on Sun, 07/12/2009 - 13:50.

thanks!

Thanks so much for these lessons. It's so easy to get into the whole drupal stuff by following the videos! Good job!

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 08/06/2009 - 07:43.

how u created site navigation bar...?

hi all,
i want to know some information about creating navigation bar
for example...in this great site u make under ur logo href or tabs (home , about,...)
is this is a module u enabled or code or configration..?

i'll be more than greatfull for ur help

thanks

learnbythedrop's picture
Submitted by learnbythedrop on Thu, 08/06/2009 - 19:05.

Building Menus

No special module required. If you go to /admin/build/menu on your site you can start building menus. The menu links that you referred to on my site were created via the "primary links" option. Be advised that different themes display primary links differently so they won't necessarily be in the same spot as mine.

Bigfella!'s picture
Submitted by Bigfella! (not verified) on Fri, 08/28/2009 - 16:15.

Keep up the good work

Ignore the negative comments you have received so far (not many though).

I'm someone who is new to the world of Apache/MySQL/PHP and definately Drupal.

I installed AMP manually after following a book (so I knew what was going on) then started to learn PHP and style sheets etc. I'd last used FrontPage in 1997 to create a web site! I assumed I was going to have to do a lot of coding to get our new site up to scratch.

The charity I work for want to redevelop their static site to use AMP. That's why I was learning PHP and CSS. Until a month ago I'd never heard of Drupal. (Thanks to the Artisteer prototyping software reviewed in PCPro.)

Thank God I found out about it. It reduces my coding to a negligible amount.

I've never known too much about GPL (freeware) software. I've now got a home machine running Windows 7 RC with Apache, MySQL, PHP and Drupal. And the only one I will have to pay for eventually is Windows 7. Possibly, I'll eventually move to a free version of Linux (and open office?).

I found it very difficult to understand Drupal from all the sites on the internet and the documentation on the drupal.org site. I bought Pro Drupal Development (for £6.34 from Amazon!) thinking it would provide the information I needed. No coverage of installation at all! (I suppose 'Pro' suggested this). I must say after reading the first three chapters of this book I was more depressed than I have ever been reading an IT manual. The problem was that I had no overview of Drupal so didn't really know what it was talking about.

I then had a (for me) radical idea of looking on YouTube. That's when I found this brilliant site. I've been able to run your video side by side with my localhost Drupal site and follow along. I think your delivery is excellent. I can guarantee you that there will be an increasing number of people who need a solid guide to installing and using Drupal.

I'm not too bothered at the low quality of the videos as I have my live version running alongside yours (sorry you lose $2.99 for each video!).

I'm at the start of my journey with Drupal but I'm really pleased that you have provided this clear information.

Now...

Onto the next lesson...

francbruno's picture
Submitted by francbruno (not verified) on Sat, 08/29/2009 - 13:02.

Many thanks

I followed your info and video, at certain point decided to downgrade to php to 5.2.29 and all went smoothly.
Keep doing your good job. I really appreciate if you feel excited to put more videos online
Regards from Portugal !!!

Seyed's picture
Submitted by Seyed (not verified) on Mon, 09/07/2009 - 05:55.

Very Good Tutorial

Thank you very much for doing this, it was very good and clear.

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 10/24/2009 - 08:33.

rearrange the frontpage

How can i in a simpel way rearrange the front page, suppose that i have 5 pages promoted to the front page and i want to rearrange them.

How does nodequeue module help ? i can create ques, and these pages to the que but i dont know how to associate this que with front page ??

learnbythedrop's picture
Submitted by learnbythedrop on Thu, 11/05/2009 - 23:30.

Nodequeue

When you say rearrange I assume that you mean vertically. You can do that with Nodequeue. First of all you want to create a queue of nodes in the desired order. Then you can use the views module to create a page of the queue. The key in doing that is to add a relationship and when you go to add a relationship you will see a dropdown box titled "Groups" and you'll want to select Nodequeue, check the nodequeue check box then there will be a configuration box that allows you to select the queue you want.

You'll make that view a "page" view and give it a unique url. You can then go to the site information page (/admin/settings/site-information) and enter that url next to the field label "Default front page" which is at the very bottom of that page.

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 04/26/2010 - 10:00.

Re: Basic Site Configuration

Hi,

I just watched your second video of your drupal tutorials, its really clear and easy to understand, much easier than some of the docs on the drupal website.

Thanks for this, with your videos I hope I'll be able to create my website soon !!!!

Many thanks again for your help understanding drupal

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 06/23/2010 - 15:56.

Re: Basic Site Configuration

Your tutorials are really nice, keep up the good work. It is clear and easy to understand.

Jb's picture
Submitted by Jb (not verified) on Sun, 09/19/2010 - 04:48.

Tab in a profile

My friend and I are working on a site and we're using QuickTabs. We're trying to have it so that each tab corresponds to user's specific preferences, such as "favorite food" tab would show a picture of the food he/she uploaded. And we're stuck here. I know Drupal SN got this down and I'm able to see contents applicable to me only when I'm on 'my profile' (on DrupalSN.com). How can we mimic such behavior? Are the contents of the tabs referencing a node? or something done with the view? Basically, we want to also have our-site.com/user/name-of-user and see a tab there that was generated during the registration process (or edit on the fly after) and the tab is specific to user/name-of-user person. Other users can also see the same tab when they're visiting one's page (their profile like drupal SN).

Please help us out if you have some time!

Thanks!!!

learnbythedrop's picture
Submitted by learnbythedrop on Sun, 09/19/2010 - 09:28.

Re: Tab in a profile

I'm not familiar with what they're doing over at Drupal SN. If you haven't already you might want to drop them a line to ask them exactly how they did it. I think that if you want to show a tab that corresponds to a particular user you will want to use Views Tabs. http://drupal.org/project/views_tabs By using views you can include tokens as a placeholder for a particular user's ID.

Nick's picture
Submitted by Nick (not verified) on Tue, 02/01/2011 - 01:00.

impressive

thanks a lot this is really helpful!I tryed 2 days to use drupal and I did not get over the instalation but now in 30 min I progresed more than in a usual week.

I am not good at using this even tough I have some quite good knowledge about html and css....I hope after I get used to this I will also find a vid tut of yours explaining how I can make my own theme(html and css coded) a drupal theme.

Thank you again :d