Can someone please post what modules are being used to create this wiki type page? (Selwyn 10-3-07)
These notes were originally part of this article. I moved them to this wiki page so that others could contribute comments and corrections.
General Order of Setup
These are the things generally done (in order) to configure a Drupal site after initial installation.
- Site Configuration > Clean URLs
- Site Configuration > Site Information
- Site Configuration > Date and Time (set time zone)
- Site Configuration > File system (defaults may be ok)
- setup cron
- Poormanscron is an alternative if you don't have access to running cron jobs on your host.
- cron doesn't have to be run on your web server host -- setup a cron job anywhere that periodically browses cron.php on your site
- Logs > Status Report (verify everything looks ok)
- Site building > Modules
- Site building > Blocks
- User management > Roles (setup an admin role)
- User management > Access control (give admin role full access)
- Site Configuration > Performance
Recommended Modules by Category
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- implement a "good" theme - a vital practice, not a module
- a good theme is most important to SEO
- best for SEO if theme places the main content before the sidebars in the HTML
- the default (Garland) is mostly pretty good (unfortunately the left sidebar is before the main content)
- path
- in core
- maps URLs like /node/1 to something like /welcome
- pathauto
- automatically generate paths
- most useful with taxonomy
- great for search engines
- Meta tags
- formerly known as: nodewords
- puts <META> tags in documents
- highly configurable, often runs on autopilot
- XML Sitemap
- formerly known as: gsitemap
- creates sitemap.xml
- provides an index for search engines
- generally runs on autopilot
Content-Focused Modules
- taxonomy
- in core
- create vocabularies, terms within vocabularies
- use to put categories, tags, whatever-you-wanna-call-it on nodes
- category - not recommended
- designed to replace the core "taxonomy" module
- some people like the features it adds
- not friendly for core upgrades
- once categories are in use, you are committed. Reverting to taxonomies is a non-trivial task.
- views
- slice and dice content
- queries database to create custom blocks, pages of teaser lists, and more
- panels
- create a page with content arranged into areas, e.g. multicolumn
- no custom page coding required
- diff
- shows differences between node revisions
- revisions (supported in core) are required, but not on by default
- check "create a new revision" in "publishing options"
- Do Administer > Content types to turn on by default for a node type
- cck (content construction kit)
- create custom fields on nodes
- plays well with views
Images
Images are used so differently among different types of websites that it is difficult to recommend "must have" modules for a basic site. However, here are a few modules that are worth exploring for basic functions.
- image
- create nodes that are images and can upload them
- imagefield
- used with CCK
- add images to posts
- Image Assist (img_assist)
- helps with uploading and inserting images
Administration Modules
- update status
- you want this
- will be core in Drupal 6
- tells you when contributed modules have been updated
- lets you know when an update is critical
Community Modules
- blog
- in core
- meant for a community blog site: multiple authors, articles promoted to front
- single user blog could just use story content type
- forums, comments, and tracker
- in core
- beware of performance impacts on large sites, especially combined with tracker
- buddylist
- Privatemsg
Other
- devel
- for developers
- can do some database performance profiling
- E-Commerce
- TinyMCE
Other Cool Modules
- LoginToboggan
- can allow user to select their own password from the beginning
- can send email with link to activate account
- Web Form
- a fancier contact form
- one cool alternate approach is create a content type in CCK and turn off "published" status by default
- CAPTCHA, akismet
- modules to prevent spam [What is a captcha?]
- organic groups
- service links