Drupal walkthru

This page is a summary of the basic steps taken to get a rough drupal install in place to mimic an existing site. Most steps are documented after the fact, so there could be missing pieces of info.

  1. install Drupal (version 6 was used here)
    • make sure to read the INSTALL.txt file to see what to do with permissions, etc…
    • extract the Drupal archive and place it where you want it
    • copy the default.settings.php to settings.php in sites/default/
  2. set up the database by following the instructions in INSTALL.pgsql.txt, or INSTALL.mysql.txt
  3. open your browser and go to the location where you extracted Drupal (such as http://localhost/drupal)
  4. continue through the initial Drupal setup until complete
  5. make sure at least the following modules are enabled
    • Path - content can be accessed at /any/path/you/want instead of /node/12345
    • PHP Filter - allows embedding php code
    • Upload - upload and attach files to content
  6. use the Administer→Site Building→Modules page to enable the following modules after extracting their contents to sites/all/modules (create directory if it doesn't exist)
  7. install the CCK module to be able to create custom content types and fields
  8. install the IMCE module to easily upload and manage images for the site
  9. install the WYSIWYG module to be able to allow users to author content similar to using a word processing program
    • You need to then download the editor(s) you want, and place the extracted contents in sites/all/libraries/<editor dir> (see wysiwyg page under Administer→Site Configuration→wysiwyg for info)
    • Several editors were tried. While many seem to like the Yahoo YUI Rich Text Editor, I was unable to get the upload features to work, especially with the CCK content types. The upload feature is supposed to show up when you click the image button in the editor, but it wouldn't show in some instances. If the body field was part of the content type, the upload would show. If the body field was removed from the content type, the upload wouldn't show for the other CCK fields, and it would also not work if the body field was ordered below the other fields. You also have to tell this editor exactly which fields you want it attached to by giving the field id. This is usually edit-body for the body field, but it's probably best to visit a page with a CCK field and inspect it to see what a custom field id is.
    • I eventually set up TinyMCE as part of WYSIWYG. There is another module to use with IMCE called the IMCE WYSIWYG API Bridge. This module allows several editors to take advantage of the IMCE features for uploading and managing images. The only trick is that you need to click which buttons to show in TinyMCE, and also check the IMCE option in the same place. This is done on the Administer→Site Configuration→WYSIWYG page, after you assign an editor to an input type, and then click Edit. Make sure at least the Image and IMCE buttons are checked. When this is complete, you will be able to click the image button in TinyMCE, then click the little box at the top right to open the IMCE browser.
  10. customize the layout by theming
  11. add custom features to the site by developing custom modules
  12. to add areas of the site that are totally custom, not using anything Drupal, we need to add this to the root .htaccess file, right above where Drupal routes everything back to index.php:
      # added custom rule for php not to be handled by drupal
  RewriteRule ^myscripts/(.*)$ sites/default/myscripts/$1 [L,QSA]
  13. even though we've created a custom area of the site, it is best to use the same layout pages as drupal, so come up with a scheme to access the layout tpl.php files in the active theme folder; you may also want to access the same session as Drupal was using