How to speak “Drupal”

One of the biggest hurdles to overcome when learning about Drupal is all the terminology thrown around -- node, contrib, CCK -- what the heck are they talking about? In this section you'll find some links to resources that will help you dive more into the world of Drupal.

Hiring Drupal developers, designers, and other web professionals

So, you need to hire someone to help with your site – who do you hire? How much do they charge? What qualities should you look for? Where can you find someone?

This process can seem confusing to those not familiar with hiring technical help to build or maintain a website, it’s not so bad! Before starting, it’s important that you determine your needs and have a basic idea of budget.

Creating an online store with Drupal

Setting up an e-commerce website involves a fair amount of effort and planning, but the benefits are considerable. With e-commerce, customers may enter payment information on your website to purchase products and services from anywhere in the world. A well-designed online store also allows customers to select between multiple product variations and shipping options, giving them an easy to use and rewarding shopping experience. And the funds (minus processing/service fees) are deposited to your bank account within weeks (or even days)!

Depending on the complexities of your website/product, an e-commerce site can be a simple do-it-yourself endeavor or require lots of technical/development expertise. In either case the initial steps are the same:

1. Establish a business entity to conduct business online, including a business name and location.
2. If you are shipping products, obtain a tax ID to charge sales tax in the state where your business resides.
3. Pick a general structure that gives your business a separate legal and tax identity from yourself, including a dedicated business bank account. This allows you to be sure that the money and acts of your business are separate from your own.
4. Choose a reliable, reputable web host and begin development on a test site.

Electronic Commerce And Drupal

Übercart has become the leading option for Drupal e-commerce, though there are others such as the "e-Commerce" suite of modules.

e-Commerce is a solid platform that can handle most needs, but we feel Übercart is more user-friendly and possesses a stronger support and development community. And since Übercart is nearly equivalent in terms of features, and is at a stable release now, we believe it is the winning choice.

Of course, every project is unique, so look at both and choose the option best for you. One may have a specific feature that you need. A more in-depth comparison can be seen here.  This post is a bit out of date now, but there is still solid info here, and check the comments for more info.

Übercart Overview

Übercart allows you to sell physical products from various sized product catalogs, file downloads (music, videos, software), and site access/role promotions (i.e. for members-only websites, including automatic renewals and expiration of user access).  This site you’re on right now is built with Ubercart!  Also, check out their live demo of Ubercart.

Übercart’s main features:

• Products are nodes, making it possible to create multiple product types with classes, and you can add any standard Drupal fields to your products.
• Products may have attributes that modify the price, SKU/model, and/or weight of items.
• Products are then displayed in your catalog, with or without images, by category, and with numerous configurable options.
• Store administrators can manually create orders for customers, add products, shipping prices, etc. from a single screen.
• Stock tracking options are available.
• Activity logging shows all the changes made to an order, including payment processing.
• All checkout information is gathered on a single screen composed of configurable checkout panes.
• Support for international shipping and formats is available.
• Shipping quotes are generated in real time from modules or web services.
• A healthy and growing list of module contributions submitted by community members, as posted here.
• More information about Übercart can be downloaded here (pdf).

Integration With Drupal

Unlike shopping cart-only systems, Drupal allows you to combine a fully functional community, business, or news website with your e-commerce. This adds powerful options for blogs, forums, social networking, custom displays of content, newsletters, and much more. These features can help your bottom line, as studies show the longer browsers stay on a site the more likely they are to purchase.

Other advantages of using Drupal for e-commerce include Drupal’s secure application framework and search engine optimization features. In addition, Drupal and Übercart have an ever-growing community of developers, a growing list of themes available for download, and numerous consultants offering design/theming services.

Übercart also leverages the power of Drupal through:

• User System: User accounts are automatically generated when a purchase is made. This allows you to track and communicate with your customers, and encourages repeat business.
• Taxonomy System: This important aspect of Drupal’s content management is integrated with Übercart’s core product catalog.
• CCK: Übercart works with the CCK (Content Construction Kit) suite of modules to allow product customization in numerous ways.
• Views: Übercart integration enables product display and organization by selected fields, filters, page views, etc.
• Userpoints: Users may accumulate points for performing certain actions on your site, such as posting nodes, commenting or moderating a comment, and this can be tied in to your shopping cart
• Fivestar: A module that enables customers to review/rate selected products (seen in stores like Amazon.com where multiple products and manufacturers are offered). 

Payment Options

Übercart works with the 2 main types of payment gateways:

1. Third party. A secure order form takes customers to another site for credit card processing and payment. The main advantages are no SSL certificate is required for your site, and the third party deals with all CC processing, but these usually charge higher per-transaction fees and require the customer to be bounced over to the payment processor’s site. Some common third party gateway providers are PayPal, 2Checkout, and ClickBank.
2. Merchant-side Application Program Interfaces (or API). This is a server-based system allowing the entire transaction to be handled on your website. The main benefits are that it keeps people on your site and offers more options for customizing the checkout experience. These also usually offer a lower per-transaction cost, but you will need an SSL certificate.  Some popular merchant-side gateways are Authorize.net, PayPal (yes, they do both options), and LinkPoint.

Currently Ubercart works with dozens of payment options.  A full list can be viewed here, and other payment plugins can be easily written.

If you are going with the API option, you’ll need an SSL certificate.  This is often the most confusing part of your e-commerce setup.  This is essentially what gets your end users notification that your server and purchasing process is secure.  If you are concerned about your customers having the highest level of trust for your site, you will want to stick with one of the top few SSL certificate providers.  We like DigiCert as a lower cost but still top tier SSL provider.

Drupal-specific Considerations

With the ever-growing number of modules available for Drupal, the options for Übercart integration are extensive. Here are some additional modules that are often used with a Drupal e-commerce site:

• Google Analytics: You can track core sales, customer and product reports with Google Analytics integration.
• Securepages: Allows you to coordinate your site with its SSL certificate. SSL (secure sockets layer) encryption protects your customers’ sensitive information during online transactions.
• Pathauto: Automatically generates path aliases for various kinds of content (nodes, categories, users) without requiring the user to manually specify the path alias.
• XML Sitemap: Creates a site map in accordance with the sitemaps.org specification.

This should give you a good overview of what is involved with creating an e-commerce site in Drupal.  It’s not something that can be built in an hour, but we firmly believe that Drupal + Ubercart is the winning choice for creating an online store with free, open source software. 

Choosing Drupal modules

Modules extend the core, or ‘out of box’ abilities and functionality of Drupal. If you can think of a function or use for Drupal which is not included with a basic Drupal installation, chances are there is already a module to fit the bill. One of Drupal’s primary strengths as a CMS is the vibrant, active community development of modules, as well as core functionality.

• Community contributed modules can be found via the web here.
• Register for an account on Drupal.org in order to filter modules by Drupal version
• The ultra friendly and helpful IRC community support can accessed by visiting the #Drupal-support channel on the Freenode network
• Can’t find a module to fit your needs? Make your own!

Now to our tutorial; for our purposes it would be best to walk through an actual example. We’ll use one of the most commonly used modules, Views.

How to add (install) a Drupal module

First we download the module. Here’s how to find a module, and evaluate its stability and quality. Also, how to choose the correct release version.

1.  Navigate to http://Drupal.org/project/Modules
2. Click on the ‘Browse by name’ tab. Loading this tab can take some time, as you will be presented with a list of all contributed Drupal modules. 
3. Scroll down to the section for ‘Views’.
4. Click on the ‘Views’ link to view the full module information page.

Displayed is all the information/links you need to evaluate a module, including: name of maintainer, module description/overview, release versions and a host of support, development and bug/issue tracking links. 

1. First off, you should read all of the description notes for a module; this is the large block of bulleted text below the module name/maintainer’s name. 
2. Next, examine the ‘Releases’ table.

On this table you have the module release version (‘5’ meaning compatible with Drupal 5, ‘.x’ meaning compatible with all versions of Drupal 5, and ‘-1.6’ is the version of Views within the Drupal 5 release), the date of release, the size of the module download, a download link and release notes (notes from individual developers detailing issues dealt with or functionality added).

Here you are presented with two main choices: Drupal 5 or Drupal 4.7. This tutorial is aimed at Drupal 5.x users, so obviously you’ll be more interested in the 5.x-1.6 release. Now, you could just go ahead and get this module via the ‘Download’ link, or you could take another minute to make absolutely sure you know what you’re getting into! So in the spirit of gathering all available, useful information before making a tedious, possibly painful-to-undo decision, we’ll explore this module detail page in a bit more depth.

1.  For the beginner oriented scope of this tutorial we’ll skip the Release notes; Click on the ‘View all releases’ link at the bottom of the ‘Releases’ table.
2. What will load next is long list of all releases of this module, and a list of release notes for each version.

There are many, many releases for the Views module; from 4.6.x-1.x-dev at the very bottom of the page, to 5.x-1.6 and 4.7-1.6, the most recent releases, at the top. One excellent way to judge the quality and stability of a module is to gauge the number of total releases and the amount of time in between releases; this way you can make some very educated guesses at how much use, support and development is going on for a module. If there are only one, or two or three releases, or if development seems to happen once every couple of years or so, then the module is not in active development, which could mean that it is not used due to negative issues and bugs, or there is little demand for the module, so no one really works on it. Choosing modules is sort of like choosing leftovers to eat from the refrigerator; if there’s an old, dusty module found in the back corner of the contributed modules section of Drupal.org, you definitely want to use caution before consuming!

Next we’ll want to take a look at the module issue queue, which is found via a link near the bottom of the module detail page here:

Here is what a module issue queue looks like:

Notice that this page is a list of bugs, problems and incompatibilities involving ‘Views’ module, sorted by the most recently updated. Assessing a module based on this view is similar to an assessment based on analyzing a set of release notes for a module.

You should always go to view all open issues and take a quick look at the queue to see if there are a ton of issues (which may mean it’s either buggy, or more likely very large/complex and popular), or next to none (which usually means it’s new or unpopular), or see if there are any that would be red flags for your particular setup (ie. an issue declaring that this module doesn’t work with another module you’re using). Combining this analysis with the analysis of related release notes can give you a good overall ‘birds eye view’ of whether or not a module, or specific release of a module, is a good match for you installation. Sometimes you just need to install it, to see if it fits your needs and is working properly, but these steps above should give you another tool in evaluating Drupal modules.

Installing Drupal modules

Now that you have a better picture of the development cycle of a module, it’s time to actually pick a release to install.

“Dev,” “stable,” “alpha,” huh?

Module release versions are generally separated into two categories: development and stable. Development releases are, as the name suggests, under active development. This means less stability, but more features. Stable releases are, as the name suggests, the reverse.

Development releases will have the word “dev” in the name as an indicator. You may also see an “alpha”, “beta”, or “release candidate” (RC) version of a module. These are also used to indicate the overall stability and completeness of a module (alpha as least stable to RC as most stable).

Unless you need a specific feature that is in a development release, or need to preview what your site will look in the next stable release, always pick the stable version of a module. The latest release of a module may be a stable or a development one. If it is a development one, the latest stable version may be found by clicking on “view all releases” and searching for the last release not marked “dev”. Note: this page is not always sorted by date so make sure you scroll.

After you’ve located the desired module, you will upload it to the proper place on your server to use it. Two common methods for doing so are with a GUI FTP client and using a direct SSH connection to your server. Both will accomplish the same thing, so it’s merely a matter of using the method that you are more comfortable with. This document go over both methods.

Uploading via FTP

1. Download the file to your own computer. With most browsers, you may right-click on the file link (labeled “views-5.x-1.6.tar.gz” above) and select an option such as “save link as..” to save it locally.
2. Unzip the compressed file using a program such as Winzip into a directory
3. Start an FTP client such as FileZilla
4. You must provide connection information before your client will connect to your site. The screenshot below illustrates the typical fields in an FTP client. The “host” field will contain the domain name that you have set aside for your website. The “username” and “password” fields contain the username and password that you use to access your website.                                                                                                                                                                                                            
5. The section labeled “Local site” represents your own computer. Navigate to the location where you downloaded the module here.    
6. The section labeled “Remote site” represents your website. When connected to a website to a Drupal installation, the file structure will resemble the image shown above.
7. Scroll down to the “sites” folder in the “Remote site” section and enter it. Inside, there will be an “all” folder and a “default” folder. Enter the “default” folder. If it doesn’t exist, create a directory named “modules” and enter it.
8. Drag the decompressed folder containing the module from the local machine over to the “modules” directory. Once you’ve done this, the module will be uploaded to your site.

SSH

An SSH session is less visibly user-friendly than a GUI FTP session. This tutorial will not go over detailed instructions on commandline usage, but will give enough to upload a file.

1. If you have Windows, puTTY is an SSH client that is freely available to you. When you start it up, you’ll be asked for a server, a username, and a password. The server is the domain name of the server you will be connecting to. If you are using Mac OS X, the terminal application is in /Applications/Utilities. The command to begin an SSH session is “ssh username@domain.com”. You’ll then be asked for the password for your server.
2. Once you’ve logged in, you’ll be presented with a command prompt. The “ls” command will give the name of every file in the current working directory. Directories inside this one will either end in a / or will be a different color. You can change directories with the command “cd ” or go back to your initial directory with “cd”. Using these commands, you can explore the directory structure of your site.
3. The top directory for your site will contain an “index.php”. If you can’t find this, you may wish to consult your tech support or webhost help pages.
4. Once you are there, type “ls” and you should see something similar to this (but with a different prompt/directory path)  
5. There are two notable directories here: “modules” and “sites”. The “modules” directory contains the core modules bundled with Drupal. You could put this module here, but it’s somewhat sloppy. The preferred place to put this module is inside the “sites” directory. Type “cd sites” to change into that directory. Inside this directory, there is an “all” directory and a “default” directory. Go into the “default” directory.
6. If it doesn’t already exist, make a directory called “modules” here by typing “mkdir modules”. Enter the modules directory by typing “cd modules”. Every module you install should go into this directory.
7. Keep this window open and go to the webpage with the desired module on it. Right-click (or ctrl-click on a mac) on the link and select “copy link” or “copy link address”. Go back to the terminal window, type “wget “ (including the space), and paste the link in. It should look like this: “wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/views-5.x-1.6.tar.gz"   Press the enter key. The file will then download directly to the server. 
8. There will now be a file that ends in .tar.gz in this directory, which you can see if you “ls” once.  
9. This file contains the entire module and must be decompressed before it can be used. To dcompress it, type in “tar -xzvf “ followed by the name of the file. The screen will then look like the following image, which displays all of the files that are being uncompressed.
10. Once you’ve done this, the module’s files will be uploaded to your site.

Enabling modules

Before the files can be used by your site, the module must be enabled.

1. The standard location for a Drupal site’s module administration page is “[sitename]/admin/build/modules”. Enter that in your browser and you will go to it.     
2. This page is where modules are listed and managed. There are two tabs to this page: “List” and “Uninstall”. For the moment, we’ll just be dealing with the “List” tab. This page contains all the modules that are currently installed. Scroll down the list, and you’ll find a series of them that begin with “Views”
3. Note that “Views” is both checked and greyed out. Modules can be interdependent. They may rely on other modules’ functionality in order to run. The modules labeled “required by” are modules that require this module to be enabled for functionality. They themselves must be disabled before this module can be disabled or removed. The modules labeled “Depends on” are modules that this module depends on. This module must be disabled before they can be disabled or removed. In this case, the Views module can’t be disabled until Location Views and Views Panes are disabled first.
4. Enable the other modules in the Views section by clicking on the checkbox and clicking on “Save Configuration”. Once the page has refreshed, you should see a screen that looks like this screenshot. The green text will notify you that you successfully enabled the modules. The exact text may be different depending on the modules you enable.                                                                                                                        
5. If you forget to enable a required module, Drupal will notify you of this gracefully. It will also allow you to enable the required module from the notification message. Read the notifications and enable the desired modules.                                                         
6. If the module is not installed, red text will appear notifying you so. If this appears, you must install that module first before enabling the one you want.

Using Panels 2

Now that the Panels 2 module is in beta and relatively stable, there is an important decision new site owners or developers need to make -- should I build my site using Panels or not?

There are pros and cons to each.

With Panels, you gain greater flexibility and power over your content, including the ability to place blocks in multiple areas, create custom per-page layouts, and customize the layout of node add/edit forms. All of this can also be done through an administrative interface right on your site. The major downside is that this is a large, complex module with a learning curve that also carries a performance hit unless you export the panels to a module.

Our themes come with additional styling and a custom TNT panel layout, if you choose to work with Panels.

Your options for a Drupal theme

There are a few ways to get a Drupal theme for your site.  These can be quite easily placed along a continuum with "Low Cost/Difficult" at one end and "Higher Cost/Less Hassle" at the other end.  It all depends on your time, skills, and budget whether you want to go more of the DIY route, hire a professional Drupal themer, or somewhere in between.

Do-it-yourself Drupal theme

If you know XHTML/CSS and know your way around a graphics editor, you may very well be able to create your own Drupal theme.  Knowing how Drupal’s bits and pieces work is more important than any kind of advanced PHP knowledge.  The difficulty of this vastly depends on how complex your desired theme is and how your skills are.  A Drupal theme can take anywhere from a day’s work to hundreds of hours.  Most of the themes you see here on TopNotchThemes took experienced designers/themers 30-50 hours to create.  Your first theme won’t be your best theme, so make sure this is an appropriate decision if you decide to go the DIY route.  For your first time, you’re probably best off trying to modify something already out there.

Free (or almost free) theme

There are tons of free and a few very low cost themes out there.  Most are available on Drupal.org.  These vary in quality and the nicest ones usually get widely used on many sites.  If exclusivity of your theme isn’t a big concern, these are a great place to look.  One of the most common approaches is to take a free theme and customize it by adding a different header or changing some styles in order to get a more custom look.  This is a great approach if you’re new to Drupal theming.  It will help you get an understanding of how things work but with a good structure beneath you.  These often have a "stock Drupal" kind of look to them so you’ll have trouble finding something completely unique.

If you’re on a tight budget but want something customized and don’t have the skills or time yourself, you can also hire a Drupal themer to spend just a few hours customizing an existing theme to suit your needs. 

Premium theme

This is really a new category in the Drupal theme world that we like to think we had something to do with  ;)  A premium theme is one that has a cost justified by the design and coding work, and support that goes into providing the themes.  These will often vary greatly from that "stock Drupal" kind of look, and are much more limited in their distribution.  A premium theme isn’t for everyone, if you’re doing an extremely low budget project or need a custom design, but they are a viable option for what’s in between.

Custom theme

A custom theme involves having a design created for your site from scratch, usually by a designer who then provides mockups (or mockups + CSS) to a Drupal themer.  Trying to pin down the cost of an "average" custom theme is kind of like asking how much a house cost — it really depends.  Bare minimum for an extremely basic, single page design would be a few hundred dollars.  Average cost for a small business site design + Drupal theme would be in the low thousands.  This can vary widely with things like number of unique pages, Drupal module support required, if you need a logo, etc., but hopefully that gives you a general idea.  It’s worth noting that there is a shortage of good Drupal themers available right now — demand is exceeding supply!

Weighing your options

The right choice for your web site project’s theme should fall into one of the categories above.  Make sure you carefully weigh your timeline, risk, budget, and skills before deciding on one of these options.  In our previous experience doing theming as part of a Drupal project team, the theme is usually 25-40% of the budget for the entire project.  Drupal’s themes aren’t just a pretty skin on a functioning website — a lot of functionality is exposed through the theme itself and it can be an uphill battle if you don’t know what you’re doing. 

Installation & configuration

Now that you’ve purchased your theme, the next step is uploading and installing it onto your site.

First, you should receive an email as soon as your purchase is processed. Included in this email is a link for downloading your theme in the form of a compressed archive. If you lose this email or cannot access the account, you may download this theme by going to http://www.topnotchthemes/user, logging in, and clicking on Files.

After you have saved your theme, you must uncompress the archive and upload (FTP) the theme files to the proper place on your server to use it.

If you don’t already have software on your computer to do these things, here are the free applications we recommend:

WINDOWS

• 7-Zip - http://www.7-zip.org
• FileZilla - http://filezilla-project.org

OS X

• The Unarchiver - http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html
• FileZilla - http://filezilla-project.org/

If you’ve never done anything like this, don’t worry! Here are the steps for uploading your theme:

1.  Download the file to your own computer. With most browsers, you may right-click on the file link and select an option such as save link as.. to save it locally.
2. Unzip the compressed file (usually by double-clicking it, or right-click on it for more options). You should see a tnt_yourthemename folder (which contains your actual theme), and then extras and documentation folders. Remember the location of this directory. 
3. Start your FTP software.
4. The program will need some connection information. The host or server field needs the domain name you’ve set for your website, or another name that your web host has specified. The username and password fields contain the username and password supplied by your web host.
5. Your FTP software will have a section labeled Local Computer and a section labeled Remote Computer, or something similar. These are the file systems of your personal computer and the web server, respectively.
6. Navigate in the local computer side to the location of the uncompressed theme. 
7. Now look at the Remote Computer side. You should see your Drupal files here, with an index.php file in this folder, or you may need to go inside a folder called htdocs or www. If you don’t see this, it’s possible that this is not the root directory of your website. Consult your web host or system administrator for the exact location in this case.
8. Inside the sites folder there should be an all and default folder. Go into the all folder and, if it doesn’t already exist, create a themes folder. Then go into themes.
9. Drag the tnt_yourthemename folder with the uncompressed theme into the new themes folder. The files have now been uploaded!

Enabling Your Theme

The next step is setting an administration theme and enabling your new theme. 

1. Log into your site with your administrator account.
2. Go to www.yoursitename.com/admin/settings/admin
3. Set your Administration Theme to Garland (or another theme of your preference, but Garland comes with Drupal 5 and is a good admin theme), check both boxes on this page and click Save
4. Go to www.yoursitename.com/admin/build/themes in your browser.
5. There should be listing of each theme available for your site. Find the thumbnail and name of the one you’ve just purchased.
6. There is an enabled column and a default column in this table. Select both of these for your new theme, and click Save.

Your new TNT theme is now activated on your site!

Configuring Your Site

There are some basic site options you may wish to go through before continuing. www.yoursitename.com/admin/settings/site-information contains several basic settings that will be used in many places. Again, you must be logged in as an administrator to use this page.

Name is the name of the site, and will be present in the header and title for all pages, unless the theme or your specific coding overrides this.

Email address is the contact page for this website.

Slogan is a tagline that most themes display near the site name.

Mission is a longer statement that themes sometimes display at the top of the content or in another appropriate area.

Footer message is a message that will be placed in the footer of each page if you fill this field in. Use this for something like a copyright statement or simple text, but menus should be added as a Drupal menu and then placed in the Footer region.

Default Front Page controls the initial page most visitors will see on reaching your website. It is initially set to node, which is usually fine. Once you get more comfortable with Drupal, you may wish to change this to something different.

Configuring Your Theme

There is also some theme-specific configuration that you will probably want to do next. On your www.yoursitename.com/admin/build/themes page, there will be a Configure link next to the theme. Click this and you can set whether your theme should show certain options, like the slogan or search box. You can also upload your own logo.

In order to fully make use of the regions and styling of your TNT theme, blocks must be configured. Blocks are displays of content that can be moved around to adjust your page layout. They could be a list of latest blog posts, a news feed, a series of images, etc. You must specify which blocks are displayed where, otherwise you will just see a simple header, footer, and your main content in the middle.

Go to www.yoursitename.com/admin/build/block, then click on the link near the top for tnt_yourthemename. Down in the table listing available blocks, use the Region drop down to select which blocks you want to display in which regions. You can use the Weight drop down to reorder them as you choose.

Note: Drupal themes from TopNotchThemes have many more regions and styles than most Drupal themes available. They are quite flexible, but there are some design constraints. You may not be able to put lots of blocks in some regions, or put a large image in a certain area, or your design will look awkward. We have tried to strike a balance between high end themes with strong aesthetic appeal, while still giving you the option to move content around where you need. Experiment to figure out what works best for your theme!

Removing Your Theme

You may wish to disable or remove a theme. The procedure is very simple.

To disable a theme, go to www.yoursitename.com/admin/build/themes, select a different theme as default, and uncheck enabled on the theme.

To completely remove a theme, FTP to your site as we did in the installation process. Navigate to the same location you used to install the theme and delete the folder you copied over initially. Once you’ve done this, the theme will be completely erased. If you want it back, you will have to redo the installation procedure.

Advanced Configuration

PANELS 2

Panels 2 is a popular Drupal module that allows you to easily (drag-and-drop!) create highly custom block layouts on a page-by-page basis. Your theme has basic Panels 2 support built in, so you can use this module to create more advanced layouts, either in conjunction with or instead of some of the regions of your TNT theme. Please see the panels.txt documentation file in this folder for more info.

VIEWS

Views is another extremely popular Drupal module that lets you create custom listing pages, blocks, and other displays of content. Install this on your site to create more ways to display and filter your content. Pages and blocks generated by Views will also have styling from your TNT theme applied.

EDITING YOUR THEME

It is also quite easy to make modifications to your TNT theme to further customize it for your specific needs. See the notes_on_themename.txt file for more details on this.

Creating a backup of your database

Before performing any procedures that affect your database (such as installing or upgrading a module), you should create a backup in case you need to restore your site. The database contains all of the content of your website, as well as its settings and configuration options. As such, any issues caused by bugs in modules, conflicts between code, or data errors can seriously impact the content and functionality of your website.

Most web providers use software called PhpMyAdmin to allow easy administration of the MySQL database software that is also commonly used. This tutorial will focus on using it to create a backup.

1. The exact method for reaching the PhpMyAdmin page for your website differs depending on your web host. Please consult their documentation or consult your system administrator for more detailed instructions in accessing it. It may simply be called something like “DB Admin”. 

1. This is the main page. Begin by clicking on the “Export” link under the MySQL section of the main browser window.

1. This is the export page. Be sure to choose your database’s name in the Export selection box before moving on.

1. Scroll to the bottom and select the “gzipped” compression method and check the “save as file” box.

1. A save file dialog box will pop up. The file you download will contain the backup of your website’s database. You can use this if you need to restore the contents and settings of your website.

Upgrading Drupal modules

Upgrading modules is a more involved process than installing or removing modules. The steps should be followed closely, as all these steps are necessary to ensure the stability of your website.

Database Backup

Your website’s database contains all of its content, as well as all of its settings and configuration. As such, any operation which modifies it could, although unlikely, be potentially damaging. We highly recommend you take steps to back it up before performing this procedure.

Update Module

Update capabilities are not automatically available in Drupal. You must first install the Update module, which is located here: http://drupal.org/project/update_status . Follow the instructions for installing modules with this module before continuing as it is required for the other steps.

Check Module status

1. The Update module can check your modules for updated status automatically to assist you with updates. It will provide you with download links and available versions. Once the Upgrade module is installed and enabled, you can reach a list of modules for update by either clicking on the “available updates” link on the main administration page or by going directly to [sitename]/admin/logs/update. This page checks the current and the installed versions of modules, and will give a report on their status. This will allow easy updates without having to manually check each module installed in your website.
2. In this example, the Views module is out of date. Any out-of-date module will be labeled in red, as shown above. We can upgrade this now.

Disable Module

You must first disable the module. Follow only part of the instructions listed here. Stop at the section labeled “Uninstalling a module” and only perform the first section of steps for disabling a module.

Reinstall Module

Next is reinstalling the module. These instructions are to be followed in their entirety. However, the Update module also provides a download link which may be used instead of going to Drupal.org as listed in the instructions.

Run update.php

Update.php is a script that is used to maintain websites after upgrades. A new version of a module may change the structure of the database. This script adjusts the database to fit the updated module. As the database contains all of the content and the settings of your website, this is an essential step to ensure its continued operation.

1. The update.php script can be called two different ways. You may go to the main administration page and click on the “update.php” link on the front page, or you may go directly to [sitename]/update.php in your browser.

1. Read over the content of this page. Instructions for a database backup are linked to above, and should be followed as noted here. You will require admin privileges to perform this upgrade. The first account created on your site will have the required privileges.

1. If you do not have the proper privileges, you will receive this screen. Either log in or follow the instructions on the page to perform the upgrade.

1. Once you have the proper privileges, you will see this screen. Click on the “Select versions” link to expand the section.

1. These dropdown boxes contain database updates specified by modules you have installed. If you are not developing your own module or troubleshooting, you should leave them alone and just click the “Update” button. The correct items should already be selected by default — either “No updates available” if there have not been any database changes, or a number, which is simply an ID number of the database upgrade being applied.

1. This next page may take a small amount of time to load, as the server is modifying your database. This page will display any errors that may have occurred during the process. If none have occurred, your module upgrade is complete!

Uninstalling Drupal modules

Uninstalling a module is easy. Before removing it, it must be disabled.

Disabling a module

1. Go to [sitename]/admin/build/modules. 

1. Scroll down until you find the modules that you’d like to remove.   

1. In this case, you’ll want to disable all of the “Views” set of modules. In order to disable a module, click to uncheck the “enabled” checkbox that’s next to it. If a module box is greyed out, that means you cannot yet disable it. This is because there is another module that requires that module to be active.

1. In this case, Views RSS and Views UI must be disabled first before the Views module can be disabled. Uncheck those boxes first, then click on “Save configuration”          

1. Once the page refreshes, the checkbox next to the Views module will no longer be greyed out. Repeat the process with the Views module, and everything will be disabled.  

Uninstalling a module

Not all modules have specific uninstall functions programmed in. A module will only show up on the uninstall tab if it has this feature. If it doesn’t, skip this step and simply delete its files.

1. Click on the “uninstall” tab at the top of the [sitename]/admin/build/modules page. It will look like this: 

1. Click on the checkbox next to the desired module (in this case Views) and click the uninstall button.

1. Next, you’ll have a screen verifying your intention to uninstall this module.  

1. Click on the uninstall button again, and you’ll get a screen with green text verifying that the module is uninstalled.

Remove/delete module files

Removal of module files is similar to the process of uploading module files.

1. Use the same FTP client software as used in the uploading process, and use the same connection information.
2. Navigate to the same directory
3. Instead of uploading files from your own computer, delete the directory containing the desired module. 

SSH

1. Use the same SSH client software as used in the uploading process, and use the same connection information.
2. Navigate to the same directory.
3. Instead of using the wget command to upload files, use the command “rm -rf [module folder name]”. In the Views example, you would type “rm -rf views”.

Note: a module without an uninstaller may leave tables or fields in your database. A module like this must be dealt with manually in order to completely remove it from your database, which is best practice to keep your site clean if you definitely do not want to use this module again. There may be an obviously named table or set of tables in your database which can be easily deleted, but the only way to know for sure is to examine the module installation file to see what was added in the first place. Always create a backup snapshot of your database before attempting this!