Building a Website Using Drupal

What do The Beatles, Amnesty International and The Economist have in common? Their websites all run on Drupal. Drupal powers 2.1% of the world’s websites, including the White House’s website. It is an open-source content management platform written in PHP. This means that if you install Drupal, you can use it to create any kind of website you want – a blog, e-commerce site, forum, etc. This is a giant leap from the days when, to create a website, you would have to write all your code from scratch. Drupal saves you most of the effort by giving you the skeleton – you can make the outside look however you want.

Drupal essentially works like this: you download the Drupal framework onto your web host. Then you download the modules you need to create the kind of site you want – for example, you can use a module for blogs with comments if you’re creating a blog. Think of it as custom-building a phone with the features you specifically want, like high-speed processor, good camera, lots of space, etc.

Although it is popular for making website creation an easy process, more advanced features take time to learn. But Drupal is worth the effort and there are many tutorials out there tailored for everyone from novices to programmers trained in other languages. Moreover, as newer versions of the software are released, it becomes easier for someone without a background in coding to use it.

Drupal is open-source – if you ever feel confident enough to code a module for others to use, you can do so! But if you only intend to be a user, then you have a wide range of modules to choose from, coded by people across the world.

Of the many tutorials, reviews and comparisons out there about Drupal, we look at websitesetup.org’s tutorial on how to build a website using Drupal. To get started, you need Drupal installed on your web host.

To start off, the tutorial teaches you how to change your site’s title and add a slogan. It then goes on to show how to change or modify the theme, add an “about” page, use the contributed modules which Drupal is most famous for and create blocks to organise content. The tutorial is suitable for new users and provides clear instructions on how to proceed. If you still need more help, you can always take advantage of the vast(ly helpful) Drupal community. Happy developing!