Making a blog on Drupal

Recently, on my blog, I posted an article about creating a blog based on Drupal. I'll post it here. I hope it will be useful to someone.

Choosing a CMS for a blog is a serious and responsible matter. I suppose that every blogger who creates a standalone blog has spent a lot of time studying various reviews and comparisons of popular engines, as well as testing their functionality. This period was with me.

Perhaps the most popular engines now are Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal. In any case, they are the most famous of the free CMS. After studying them, I stopped at Drupal and am very happy about it. Without going into details about the advantages of Drupal (this is a topic for a separate article), I note only that I liked the following features:
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• System flexibility Architecturally Drupal is built very intelligently and modularly, which allows you to make it anything you want.
• Quality code. Due to the rather strict quality control, Drupal and its modules are not only stable, but also have quite readable code.

There are some drawbacks, of course, but now, actually, this is not about me. Now that I have stabilized a set of modules and settings, I would like to write about how to make a blog based on Drupal.


The functionality of the blog Drupal provides out of the box. But there are nuances. The specific implementation depends on the features of the blog and its positioning. There are two options:

1. Using the built-in module Blog. When it is turned on, each user has a personal blog and a new type of blog entry material. If you also enable the Blog API module, you can create blog entries using any external client that supports XML-RPC. This approach is universal, but, in my opinion, redundant for a blog that is maintained by one person. Too striking orientation on "multiblogging." This is good for a multi-user site and various community sites, but too complicated for a simple blog. Therefore, I went on the second option.
2. Use for posting the standard type of material "Story" (Article). Here everything is much easier. Materials are simply placed on the main page, while the Blog module is inactive. I think this method is ideal for a personal blog.

Actually, either of the two proposed options provides basic blog functionality. But, of course, there are many modules that allow you to make the blog more comfortable for readers and the author. Now it will be about them.

First, I will list the modules that add functionality, without which you can hardly imagine a modern blog:

• Archive . This module provides an archive of posts in calendar form. The module is easy to use and provides everything you need. There is another similar module - Calendar . But I would not advise the latter to use, since it creates too many empty links that not only do not carry any materials, but theoretically could cause the site to fall due to excessive load from search bots.
• Monthly Archive . Adds the “Archives by Month” block. Showing months with the number of posts.
  Comment Notify. This module is needed to send notifications of new comments in the topic to everyone who commented on this topic. Unfortunately, there are errors in the module about which I wrote here (you can also download the corrected version there).
• Comment Subjects . The module for setting the default more intelligible topics for comments. Sets a topic of the form “Re: post_ topic_or_or_comment”. This kind of theme is more familiar than what Drupal offers by default.
• Read More Tweak . A small module for installing more familiar to the user link "Read more."
• Similar Entries . This module provides a very useful functionality - a block with links to articles similar to the current one. Unlike many similar modules, the relevance of the links offered by this module is quite adequate.
• FeedBurner . A module to support RSS feeds broadcast by FeedBurner . Performs on the fly redirecting any feeds to FeedBurner.
• Taxonomy DHTML . This module, in principle, is not required for a blog. But it seemed to me very convenient and useful. The module builds a category tree (based on taxonomy terms and their dictionaries) and provides blocks with links to categories for each taxonomy term. This is not a direct analogue of the popular tag cloud, but a tree view of them. For tag clouds you can use, for example, Node Cloud .

In addition, there are modules, the functionality of which, though not mandatory, but pretty adds convenience to the blog:

• BUEditor . Convenient, but at the same time simple text editor. In addition, as an editor, you can use the TinyMCE WYSIWYG Editor , but it seemed to me too overloaded.
• IMCE . Module for easy loading images. Fully integrated with BUEditor.
• Captcha . A module that provides various comment spam protection methods, such as arithmetic expressions and graphic images.
• OpenID . Module to support OpenID authorization. In this module, I also found a couple of errors. Their description and the corrected module can be found here .
• GeSHi Filter . If the blog assumes articles with examples of source codes, this module is simply mandatory. It provides syntax highlighting for a very large number of programming languages. At the same time, it does not use JavaScript for highlighting, but provides a complete filter for materials.

Of course, in this article I did not list all the modules I have installed. This is just a certain "gentleman's set", which is necessary to create a full-fledged blog. I hope this material will be useful for beginners (and not only) drupalers. In turn, I will be happy with recommendations on some other useful modules that I missed.