Introduction to Drupal 6 Tutorials
Drupal Configuration / Status Report & Cron
Subtitles of the Movie (Introduction to Drupal 6 / Drupal Configuration / Status Report & Cron)
Welcome back to Introduction to Drupal. In this tutorial we're going to go ahead and get our Drupal site configured. This will probably be a multi-part tutorial. Configuration, the initial configuration is a bunch of steps that we need to go through to get things ready for developing our website. In the last tutorial you'll recall we completed the install of our Drupal site and that's what we have here; a fresh, new Drupal 6.8 install ready to go and ready to be populated with web content. This is the web address for our site, local host /Drupal. You'll also recall that our database had been sitting there with zero tables in it because we hadn't installed Drupal yet. But notice now that once the install process is completed, the Drupal database table now is populated with data. The installer has populated our database with 46 tables. These are all of the database tables from our Drupal site. So this is our MySQL database with all of the core Drupal tables. We're not going to get into these in any kind of detail right now but just be aware that our database is now populated with tables and those tables will start accepting the data from our site as we put content into our website. So let's go ahead and get some things configured on our Drupal site. I'm going to go ahead and log into the site with my super user admin user name and password and once I get logged in I have, let's talk generally about how Drupal sites are set up in core Drupal. When Drupal gets installed, the theme that Drupal uses out of the box, core Drupal is called Garland. And the theme is all of the layout and design of the site. Why there's a blue header up here and a left-side bar with this navigation, there is a Drupal water drop icon here for our site logo and this is our site name, which the site name is always clickable back to the home page of the site, as is the logo and then up here in our web browser we also have the water droplet favicon. That shows up in our web URL. If we scroll down our site we have web content in our right sidebar and then if we scroll down more, we have a footer area of the site with a Drupal icon in the footer as well. So that's the basic layout of our core Drupal site; header area, left sidebar, right content sidebar and then a footer down at the bottom. We're going to go ahead and do some initial configuration. To initial, do some initial configuration of our Drupal site, we're going to click on the Administer Link and there are a few things we want to do to before we even start adding content to our Drupal site. We want to check on some things and make sure everything's running smoothly. Drupal's going to throw us this message that says Cron has not run and please visit status report. So the first thing that I do is I click on that Status Report Link and if it doesn't show there you can also get it by scrolling down in your Administration Menu all the way down to the bottom of the Report Section and there's a link for Status Report there as well. So I'm going to go ahead and click on that. The Status Report is very helpful. This report tells us how everything's running with our Drupal site. It shows us that we're running Drupal 6.8 and that our Update PHP File and our Settings.php File, that's this file here, that those are protected. They're read access only. It also tells us that we have our core update status is up to date so we don't have to do any patching of our Drupal site yet, that we're running a MySQL database via MOWES Portable of 5 and we have a PHP setup of 5. And our PHP memory limit's 32 meg and we have Register Globals disabled. These are all very good settings and our web server is Apache. So you want to be able to see green checks all the way down. Now, here it's telling us Cron has not run. Cron is a task that we can force to run on the server and what Cron does is it helps to keep performance of your site running smoothly, speed up performance and also to index the search capability of the Drupal site so if you turn the Search Module on it will index your site. It's just a good idea to run Cron periodically. I usually run Cron at least once a day on my Drupal site, if not more often. So to do that I'm going to click on this Run Cron Manually Link and since there's not too much data on our site it runs very quickly. Cron ran successfully and notice now that we're very good with our Status Report. Everything checks out. So it's the first configuration piece that I do, that I run. Click back on Administer here or over here and I'm going to scroll down and go under the Site Configuration area of my Administration Menu. I'm going to click on Clean URLs. Now, I know Clean URLs are enabled already because I set that as the default when I ran the Drupal installer but I'm just pointing out to you where it is if you need to go in and enable them. You can still do that. Click on Clean URLs and make sure that they are enabled. And Drupal tells you that this makes Drupal emit clean URLs without the special characters in the web address. You'll notice up here that this is indeed a clean URL. So that's nice. So let me go back to Site Configuration and I'm going to then check on Date and Time. And here you can set your default site time zone. This looks good to me for East Coast Time Zone. And you can also pick the day of the week that you want as the first day. So I'll choose Monday. And then the kind of date formatting that you want. I'm going to leave these set to the defaults but you can choose different date formats and these would be the formats that might display on a post when you submit content to the site, that type of thing. So I'm going to save my configuration and then I'm good with my date and time, go back to Site Configuration and I'm going to click on File System and this shows us the path to our Files Folder. This is very important to make; just check that Drupal has this set correctly. Remember, we created the Files Folder and so we want to make sure that that Files Folder is what's referenced in this path. And it is so that's good. And then our Temporary Directory, that's where files are temporarily stored when they're uploaded. That usually set to a default in the PHP Folder and that's fine. And then our Download Method should be set to Public because every file, image file and document that I upload to my site I want to be accessible by public. When somebody anonymously comes to my website they can view the images and download the files. Now, if you were setting up an Internet type of website or you wanted to restrict access to files, you can set it to Private and then if somebody comes to your site via public machine, not logged into your site as a Drupal user, they won't be able to download files. It's a good setting to know about. So that's the File System Settings. We're going to go back to Site Configuration and we will finish up with this general configuration in the next tutorial. We have a few more to check but again, all of the main site configuration is in the Administration Menu area under Site Configuration section and here are the links to those configuration items. So we talked about Clean URLs, Date and Time and File System. And in the next tutorial I'm going to show you how to finish up the initial site configuration.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Introduction to Drupal 6 |
| Author: | Trevor James |
| SKU: | 33992 |
| ISBN: | 1-935320-43-2 |
| Release Date: | 2009-05-01 |
| Duration: | 11.5 hrs / 114 lessons |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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