Drupal for beginners

Drupal CMS is a fantastic open source through which you can build modern websites. Whether personal blogs or e-commerce, Drupal can be the right tool for you to make it happen. If you are looking for a tutorial Drupal for beginners how to create a website then you fell on the right page!

Compared with WordPress, Drupal has more power and flexibility which means that there will be a few more options and settings that you have to deal. However, this should not prevent you from ignoring the remarkable benefits that CMS has to offer, here are some examples:

• Greater functionality : Compared to other modern content management systems, Drupal is definitely more functional, so developers like Drupal.
• Best customization possibilities : The ability to customize Drupal with the plethora of themes, plugins and configuration options which makes developers can achieve their goals on their websites. The main files can also be easily modified which is always a good feature for the development of sites.
• Security : Drupal comes with enterprise – level security and can generate detailed security reports. Drupal is also used on the official White House website ( https://www.whitehouse.gov ) and strict security is one of the reasons.

Once you have successfully followed all the steps of our Drupal tutorial, you will be prepared with the knowledge to assemble his first Drupal website. From installation to which are the modules and how to use them, but do not worry, we’ll get through it together.

Note: This tutorial was based on Drupal major version of Drupal 8.xx however, many steps listed in this guide can be applied to the major version of Drupal 7.xx

Step 1 – Installing Drupal

Option 1 – Using the auto installer

The first step to set up your site obviously involves the installation of Drupal CMS in your account Hosting Hostinger . Do not worry, the process is ridiculously easy and similar in all hosting providers. Follow these steps for installation:

1. Access your Hosting Control Panel
2. In the search bar, type auto-installer and select the tool results.
3. Click the Drupal popular.
4. Enter the details on the form (user name, password, URL, etc.) and click Install.
5. That should do it!

Note: You will have to wait a few minutes until the installation is complete.

Option 2 – Installing Drupal Manually

Do not worry if your hosting provider does not have an automatic installer or want to install drupal on localhost or VPS. Keep reading and you will learn how to install Drupal 8 manually.

Step 2 – Creating a website with Drupal

Now that Drupal installation is finished, let’s talk about building a real Drupal site. You will learn almost everything you need then tighten the belts.

Understanding Drupal admin panel

To harness the power of Drupal, you need to log in to the Admin panel. You can access it by adding a user / login at the end of your Drupal URL. For example, in our case, Drupal administration panel can be accessed through http://hostinger-tutorials.com/user/login .

Once logged in, you will be presented to the admin panel. Here you will have all the potential and authority to begin to create and customize your site. The following sections will be displayed:

1. Content: This section allows you to add and manage content, comments, or files.
2. Structure: From here, you can manage layout blocks, comments, contact forms, type of content, views, menus, taxonomy and views.
3. Appearance: The appearance section allows you to download and install themes.
4. Extensions: From the extension tab, you can download and install modules to enhance the functionality of your site.
5. Settings: Here you can adjust settings and parameters.
6. People: You can manage user accounts, permissions and roles in this section.
7. Report: Here you will get status reports or view log messages etc.
8. Help: This help section contains all the help you need during the installation process.

Creating taxonomies Drupal

Before you know what is a taxonomy, you should know the following two words:

1. Term: In Drupal domains, a term is a word used to describe or manage content.
2. Vocabulary: It is a collection of terms.

Now, a taxonomy in terms drupal uses to display specific content. So basically, a taxonomy are used to classify content in Drupal site.

Create a taxonomy is easy. You can do this by following these steps:

1. Go to tab structure .
2. Click Taxonomy .
3. Now click Add vocabulary to add a new vocabulary.
4. Enter the name (required), description (optional) to your vocabulary.
5. Click Add Terms to add new words to the vocabulary.
6. Enter the name, description, text format, URL alias (an optional URL to access the term directly. And click Save .
   
   
7. Repeat step 6 to create multiple terms.
8. And that is all. Its taxonomy is ready!

Creating Articles and Pages Basic

By default in Drupal, there are the following types of content:

• Articles: The type of content article was previously known as history. Articles are used to display information that can be changed from time to time and are usually categorized as well.
• Basic page: Basic pages can be used to display static content that is not expected to change as often as the articles.
• Blog Entry: The type of blog content was interrupted in the core Drupal 8 and is now a contributed module. It gives registered users the ability to create blogs on their websites. It can be thought of as a daily online magazine.
• Book page: This view is not enabled by default. As the name implies, it displays the content as a page of a book, to be used for when creating content for a collaborative book.
• Theme Forum: With this type of content a discussion topic can be set. Users can talk on the topic through comments.
• Poll: Finally, a search can be used to ask a question with a set of possible answers.

Let’s now talk about adding an article in Drupal, follow these steps: In Control Panel, click Content .

1. Now click Add Content .
2. In the resulting window, click the Article . You will see a screen that prompts you to add the title, the tags, body text format and the image of the article.
3. If you want to link an item to the menu, click the Settings menu and then the check box that says it provides a menu link. Here you can add the link, title, description, etc.
4. You can also add information to review, URL path settings, authorship information and publishing options for your article.
5. Now click preview to see the article or just click save and publish to let it online.
6. Your article is ready!

We will now see how to create a simple page “About Us”:

1. Click Contents and then click Add Content .
2. Now click Basic Page .
3. Now type in the title and body of the page. How is is an About Us page, you can put “About Us” in the title and put relevant information in the body.
4. Select the text format and change the menu settings if necessary.
5. To link a page link to a menu, click Provide a menu link . Enter the title, description, size, and the relationship of the item to the menu (as it is a page about us can be placed in a section as “history of the company”)
6. You can also add revision information, set the path of the URL, comments configuration, authorship information and publishing options for your page.
7. You can click the preview to view your page or just click Save and Publish to make it available online.
8. Ready, your page is now online!

creating Menus

Menus are very important, regardless of the type of site you are building, they help to categorize and structure the overall site. With Drupal, you can add, delete and rename menus and also the content that compose it. Follow the steps:

1. Click Structure and select menus .
2. Some of the default menus, such as tools, Administration, Footer, etc. already accompanied by default but can be edited.
3. Click Add Menu .
4. Add the title and the description of the menu and click Save .
5. Click Add Link to add a link to the menu.
6. In the window that appears, you are prompted to add the title of the link, the path, description, main link, link weight. You can also select whether to activate the menu or if you want to display it expanded using the check boxes activated and View as expanded checkbox. On the way, you can add links to pages, if you are creating a main menu, you can add a link to the page about us here.
   
7. Once all selections / entries are made, click Save .
8. You can repeat step 7 to add multiple links to the menu.

Creating blocks in Drupal

The blocks may be referred to as the container of objects that can be used to organize the content of your Drupal site. As an example, a user login ( block ) can be added to the footer of your site ( region ).

Follow these steps to insert blocks in a region:

1. Click Structure of the main menu.
2. Now click Block Layout .
3. Here you can analyze where you plan to insert the block. As an example, we will insert a block in the header region. Then click Insert Block near the header . Note: You can also create a custom block clicking Add Custom Block and insert the description of the body and the subsequent window.
4. The list of the blocks, click Page Title .
5. Confirm the title, visibility and region where your block and click Save Block .
   
   

Step 3 – Installing modules in Drupal

Drupal has some very useful modules present in your core, but you can extend the functionality of your site or improve their efficiency by installing modules taxpayers. In this section you will learn how to install modules with Drupal.

First, you have to navigate to the Drupal module search page and find the module. When you find the module to the page you want to install (for example, for the Chaos Tool Suite , the link is https://www.drupal.org/project/ctools ), move to the download section at the bottom.

Note: The first number in the module version is the version of Drupal core. So if you are running Drupal 8, be sure to download the module with the version number beginning with 8.

Now follow these steps to install the module in Drupal:

1. Click the right button on the download link module and select Copy Link.
2. Now go to your Drupal home page and click Extend.
3. Now click Install new module .
4. In Install from URL , paste the link you copied in step 1.
5. Click Install and wait until the installation finishes.
   

Note: If the Install new module option is not available to you, you must first enable the Update Manager module. You can find it in the section Core menu Extend .

Now take a look at some of the most useful Drupal modules:

• Chaos tool suite : Composed of a collection of tools and API that guarantee improved developer experience.
• Admin toolbar : With the Administrator toolbar, the Standard toolbar is turned into a drop – down menu. The module is very lightweight and keeps all the basic features of the toolbar.
• Meta tag : With the meta tag module, you can add meta metadata and structured to your site automatically. The model also supports meta tags that allow you to control how content is displayed when shared in social media like Twitter Cards Twitter or Open Graph Protocol Facebook.
• Google Analytics : With this module, you can add a Google site statistics tracking system to your site. You can find more information about this module here.
• Webform : With webform, you can search and forms in Drupal. You can find more information about this module here.

Step 4 – Installing Drupal Themes in

The way your site presents itself, determines the first impression in the minds of your visitors, and you want it to be a positive reaction. By default, the Bartik theme is already installed, but there are also some pre-installed themes available at your disposal for that choice. You can check the current theme that is installed and can switch between the available themes tab Appearance .

If, however, you want to install a new theme, there are many sources on the internet where you can find plenty of themes and made available by third parties for drupal. However, the most reliable source would be the Official Website of Drupal .

It is supply comes with a very useful search tool that can be used to filter the topics you would like to use. The most important option is the Core Compatibility where you must choose the version of your current installation of Drupal.

Note: As the modules, check if the theme is compatible with your main version of Drupal.

The installation process is very similar to installing modules:

1. Then right-click the file you want to install and click Copy Link.
2. Now go to your home page and click Appearance.
3. Now click Install new theme.
4. In Install from giving URL , paste the link you copied in step 1.
5. Click Install and wait until the installation finishes.
   

By default, installed themes remain disabled. To activate the new theme installed, click install and set as the default which is near the Bootstrap theme section.

If you want to adjust some theme settings, you can click the configuration that is near and continue.

Step 5 – Creating a blog with Drupal

In this part of the tutorial of our Drupal, we will create a fully functional blog with Drupal.

As mentioned before, the blog so not part of the core in the latest version of Drupal 8. So you will have to download and install this module to set up a blog in Drupal.

Once installed, the blog module should now be displayed in the module section. To view it, click Extend panel again. Check the box next to the Blog and save the configuration to enable it.

Now navigate to Contents -> Add Content . You should now see a new type of content chamapo Blog Post. Add a title, body and the publishing options for the blog and tap Save and Publish. Your blog should now be visible in the blogs section on your homepage.

Step 6 – Backing up with Drupal

Always important to make regular backups of your Drupal files. By doing so, use your Hostinger account is just too easy, just a few clicks and you’re done. Follow these steps:

1. Log in to your hosting control panel.
2. Select the Backup option is Files.
3. You will now see a list of available backups. To create a new backup, click the Generate a new Backup .
4. A dialog box asking whether to overwrite the existing backup the new one . Click Yes to replace. 

It is! Your backup is now ready to be downloaded.

Step 7 – Updating Drupal

When it comes to Drupal, the update are two different things. Updating means taking the Drupal from a minor version to another, for example, 8.0 to 8.1 or 8.2, while the update would take its core Drupal version 7 to version 8. In this section we’ll go through the steps required to upgrade to Drupal from version 8.3.7 to 8.4.

To see if an update for the core of Drupal is now available, navigate to section Reports -> Updates Available .

There are a few ways to use Drupal, for example, you can use SSH or FTP to update manually or automatic updates with the Composer . The following steps can be used to update the Drupal to a new smaller version within the main series launch.

Before starting the upgrade, it is highly recommended to enable the Maintenance mode :

1. Navigate to the Configuration section , and then click Maintenance Mode.
2. Check the site and place the option of Maintenance Mode.
3. Click Save Settings.

It can be a little tricky to update, but you need to manually replace all the files from your core, except .htaccess , robots.txt and the folder Sites . The most convenient way would be to use the FTP client such as FileZilla :

1. Download the new version of Drupal and extract the downloaded file on your computer.
2. Connect to your new FTP account and access the folder where Drupal is installed. In most cases it is in Public_html .
3. Select the core suppliers and folders as well as all files (not folders) in rais Drupal directory and delete them.
4. Now go to the folder with update files, select all files except the modules , profiles , sites and subjects and make one of them upload your hosting account.
5. Once the upload of files, visit http://seudominio.com/update.php and press Apply pending updates to complete the update process. (Image)
   
6. Turn off maintenance mode.

Drupal Tutorial: Finishing

Drupal CMS is one of the most powerful and widely updated today due to its latest features and security protection and sophisticated. This tutorial covered all the basics that can be followed by a beginner or an experienced developer to start your website with Drupal. Additional information about the platform can be found on the official Drupal documentation, check here .