Drupal 7 Business Solutions: Drupal open source content management is the perfect solution for small business websites, and this book takes you through the whole process step-by-step, from installing Drupal to incorporating sophisticated e-commerce modules.

At the end of Chapter 1, Planning our Site and Setting up Drupal, you successfully installed Drupal 7. With Drupal 7 installed you will get a core bare-bones Drupal website that you can begin to customize for your client. Your site's home page should currently look like the following screenshot:

The site displays a blue header area with the Drupal logo icon, a hyperlink to your user account page and to log out of the site. The home tab shows in the primary menu; there's a search box and a Navigation block in the left sidebar; and some default home page content. You'll also notice the black horizontal admin menu that is only accessible to you when you are logged into the site as the admin user. This menu provides easy access to the Drupal administrative interface. Finally the footer area in black contains the Powered by Drupal text. Every time you install Drupal 7 for the first time you'll see a layout similar to this. The default theme that comes enabled with...

This section will describe how to add content, or what you may be used to referring to as web pages. First we need to define some terms that Drupal uses when it deals with web-based content. When we talk about web pages within the Drupal framework, we're going to be generally speaking of nodes. A node is the Drupal equivalent of a web page, containing text, images, and other content. So when you add a page to a Drupal site you're adding a node. Additionally, each node in Drupal gets an ID that corresponds to its location in the MySQL database. In Drupal a web page is not a flat file that sits on the web server. It's a node that populates a database as data. Attached files and images get uploaded to the web server and sit in file directories, but the web content in a node gets stored in the database.

When we add nodes to our site we add them using content types. Drupal content types are used to add content to a Drupal site. Generally your client...

One significant improvement in Drupal 7 is that some of the more complex content type modules and functionalities are now built into the core Drupal, making them a lot easier to use out-of-the-box. This means that amongst other immediate benefits, your article content type comes with an image field as part of its core content type fields.

In Chapter 3, Adding Products and Services, we're going to show how easy it is to extend our content types by adding new image fields through the core content type module, but for now we'll use the image field on the Article type to populate our nodes with images.

On your Create Article form, click the Browse button in line to the Image field and locate a JPG, PNG, or GIF file on your computer. Then click on the Upload button to upload and associate the image with your article. When you upload the image, Drupal will display a small thumbnail version on your article form with a link to the full JPG version and the file size of...

Another method of creating a home page for Artisan Bakers Collective is to create a specific node in Drupal, and then specify that node as the home page. Let's walk through this process now and then you will have two home page options to present your clients with.

The first step in creating a traditional home page is to create a Basic page that will serve as the foundation for our home page. We will create the page in exactly the same way as we created the About Us page. Click on your Add content link and then click on the Basic page link. The Basic page form will load.

For this specific example of a home page using the Basic page type let's enter the text as shown in the following screenshot. Of course, you can enter any text you have that meets your client's requirements:

Select the URL path settings tab and type in home page as the path alias for this node. Then click on Save. The Basic page type does not come with an image field by default, so we'll need...

As your site gets larger and more complex, you will need to ensure that visitors can easily find what they are looking for. With traditional website development, managing navigation is among the most difficult, time consuming, and error prone tasks. Fortunately, Drupal handles the details of maintaining the navigation system for us, so we can concentrate on making sure that the navigation structure makes sense and is easy for the user to understand.

The primary way to organize content in Drupal is by using menus. The Drupal menu system organizes content in a simple outline, where a page can be nested under another page. Drupal handles the expansion and collapsing of menus to hide menus that aren't immediately relevant to the user. This helps to keep the menu short and also ensures that the visitor can easily understand your site layout. You can also create multiple menus for the site. For example, many sites will have a Main menu that is displayed on the left-hand side corner of the screen, and a smaller menu that is displayed at the top of the page, and that lets the visitor jump to a specific section of the website. Ultimately with Drupal 7 you can create as many menus as you need.

Types of menus

Drupal offers four different built-in menus:

1. Main menu

2. Management

3. Navigation

4. User menu

You can access all of your menus by going to Structure | Menus:

Although you can use these menus for any purpose you want, the standard...

The functionality that we have used so far is included in the default installation of Drupal and you don't need to do anything special to use it. However, the real power of Drupal is unleashed when you begin enabling the optional modules that are included with Drupal, and when you install contributed and custom modules.

The Drupal installation includes over 20 modules, some of which are not enabled by default. These modules may be disabled by default for several reasons. Some are disabled because they are not needed by every Drupal installation, or they may require extra configuration, or they may have an impact on performance. There are also several optional modules that are enabled by default because they are used by a majority of sites. However, if your site doesn't need the functionality they provide, you can disable them.

You can view a complete list of modules that are available on your site by clicking on the Modules link in the...

Congratulations! We have covered a lot of ground in this chapter, but we now know how to leverage the power of Drupal to create the core pages and menus of your website. You also learned how to enable and install contributed modules. The techniques that you have learned in this chapter can be applied to a wide range of websites and will probably be used in every website that you create with Drupal.

In the forthcoming chapters, we will continue to enhance the Artisan Bakers Collective website with new functionality. Although we will be using more advanced techniques in the future chapters, we will continue to refer back to many of the techniques you have learned in this chapter, especially:

As you have seen in this chapter, Drupal makes creating and maintaining a site fun, and frees you from...