Using Drupal to Build My Blog Site
This page documents how I have used Drupal to create my blog site.
Blog software
My blog site is powered by Drupal. It currently runs on version 4.6.3. Drupal does not function nicely out of box as a blog site. Some configurations and additional modules are needed to make it nicer.
Modules to Turn on
There are the modules that come with Drupal distribution
- blog
- help
- image
- node
- page
- search
- statistics
- upload
- ping - ping search sites to notify updates of your site. This doesn't seem to work for my site.
- comment - I patched the file in 4.6.3 release because I want it to support captcha. Download the patched file here
Contributed Modules to Download and Turn on
These are the modules that don't come with drupal distribution. You can find them here
- awtag - provide tagging support. I modified awTag.module to get rid of the display of "My Tags" for anonmouyous users. Download the patched file here
- captcha - it's for combatting spam bots. A user must enter some texts that matches the ones in an image before his/her comment is accepted
- feedback
- img_assist - make it easier to upload photos for your blogs.
- wiki - allow wiki-style input formatting
Theme
Drupal's look and feel can be changed dramatically by using different themes. I use SpreadFirefox theme. All I changed is just the logo.
Other Setup:
- crontab - set up a cron job to run cron.php either through the web(curl http://yoursite.com/cron.php >/dev/null 2>&1) or with php command line intepreter(php -q path_to_drupal_installation/cron.php)
- Create robot.txt which tells search engine robots what to index. see here for more details
- Clean URL - enable it under settings such that the URL looks like mysite.com/node/10 instead of mysite.com/?q=node/10. you need to enable mod_rewrite for apache. Note when you use Apache's Alias to set up a test site, you need to allow the Apache option "FollowSymLinks" in for clean URL to work.
Notes
- I don't use taxonomy(categories) for my blog site because I feel tagging(folksonomy) is enough.
Future add-ons
The following modules will be tried out when I upgrade my site to Drupal 4.7, which hasn't been released yet
- Ajax Spellcheck(It requires the javascript handling in 4.7)
Why did I choose Drupal?
I thought about using one of the blog hosting service such as blogg.com, and livejournal.com. But they don't have the essential features I want: tagging, and file upload and hosting. I really would like to have all the flexibilities. So I need to run my own blogging system instead of relying on some companies to give me a solution.
I chose Drupal because I developed a Drupal module before, so I have seen what it can offer. It has a nice system out of box, plus a lot of useful modules and themes for customization and extension.
