Matt Farina - Tech / Faith / Life

A few weeks ago the task came up to redo this blog. Because of the plan to wipe out all of the old entries, the time had come to choose a blogging engine. The slate was clean. After playing around with a few packages, including wordpress, drupal rose to the top. The choice was based on my skill level with drupal over the others. Sure, some of the other packages may be better suited for just blogging, but since making the change was about time, effort, and ease the choice quickly became obvious to run with drupal.

Setting up this blog led me to configuration that was slightly different from the other sites I had done with drupal. Here is a quick rundown on the configuration used for this drupal blog:

Note: If you are reading this and think it's a lot.... well.... after the theme was done the rest took me less than a half hour to setup including the download and install of additional modules.

The Theme: This theme is a modification of the K2 theme. The change to the page.tpl.php file was to move the primary links to the top left and the search box to the top right. In the style.css file there were several images of the transparent png nature. Because, IE doesn't display these right (the background is not really transparent) and the script I use to make IE work doesn't work for png files in the css file I had to remove them.

Also, I threw in a script for the search box. If you are in safari you will see what I mean. The search box will look just like your google search box and work like the other OS X searches.

All of the other theme changes are css related.

The Modules: To have the functionality of a well rounded blog there were a number of custom modules to install.

• Comment Info - This module stores the comment information for an anonymous user. This includes the name, email, and homepage.
• Comment RSS - The feed for comments. This is a must have for those who want to track the comments on your feeds.
• Pathauto - SEF URLs are a must these days. Pathauto can automatically generate these for you.
• Poormanscron - Without access to the servers cron jobs some features wouldn't work. This provides a work around to that.
• Service Links - To add to del.icio.us and other links to your enteries.
• Email This Page - It, um, lets you email a page.

Now comes the tricky part (well, not really), the configuration of it all:

• Enabling the Modules - Enabled the archive, blog, comment, comment info, comment rss, contact, email this page, menu, path, pathauto, page, ping, poormanscron, search, service links, and taxonomy modules.
• Setting up the Catagories/Tags - In the admin page for categories I added the vocabulary 'tags' with and set it up for free tagging on just the blog module. This section could be setup a number of ways.
• Configuring Comments - In the comments menu > configure setup the choices I selected under viewing were 'Threaded list - expanded' and 'Date - oldest first' and under posting were 'Anonymous posters must leave their contact information' and 'Display below post or comments'.
• Configuring Email This Page - In the settings page for emailpage fill out the fields for your personal pleasure.
• The Magic of Pathauto - Pathauto performs a lot of the magic of the site. In the settings page for path auto there are a few things to setup. There is no one right way so this is only a recommendation (based on SEF). Under General select 'Create index aliases'. This is important for blogging and SEF. Under the Node section for 'Pattern for all blog entry paths:' fill in '/[yyyy]/[mm]/[dd]/[title]'. When you add a new blog this will give the address the data and title. Along with the indexing when you choose /[yyyy]/[mm] all of the enteries for the month will display. This will work at all levels of the hierarchy. In the Category section under 'Pattern for all tags paths:' enter something like '[vocab]/[catpath]'. And, under the node and category sections check 'Create feed aliases'. This one module does a lot of magic for your site.
• Setting up Service Links - Go to the settings page for service_links, make sure blog is checked and then select the links you want to have on your site and where you want them. You can see I only selected a few and have them taking up minimal space. Play around with these and see what you like.

The final step here was to make a page to explain about me, post my first blog entry, setup the primary links how I wanted them, enable a few blocks to suit my pleasure, and configured a few other drupal things to finish it off (see the settings page).

In the end, this created a well rounded blog with minimal effort.

Drupal users, what modules, configurations, or other customizations would you recommend? Any other customizations you are curious about? Is there something blog wise that should be added to this site or list?

Technorati Tags: drupal, blog, blogging