Please read before going further
I am a Software Developer since year 2007 and working with DRUPAL from year 2009. I have developed more than 50 websites world wide. Also Worked also as a DRUPAL instructor, trainer and consultant in various firm.
In my DRUPAL journey i have learned so many things and i feel that i have to write something important who are new to DRUPAL or want to be a good DRUPAL developer. So whether you are a new (experience) DRUPAL developer (designer), you must have know this very basic or mostly installed or mostly used module.
You have found so many tutorials about this topic, i suggest read some of these and compare with me and give me a comment whether is this useful tutorials or not.
Most needed modules in my experience
You can not think yourself as a Drupal fan without these modules. I know different people have different opinions but i must say these below are most needed modules
- admin menu for admin purpose
- module filter for admin purpose
- path auto for generating auto url. Since pathauto depends on path auto, so to enable pathauto you need token module also
- backup_migrate for admin purpose
- Devel for generating auto content
- Views for display content is customized ways
Create directory for installaing modules
For drupal6, module directory was not created. So create a directory named "modules" inside /sites/all and inside "modules" create another directory called "contrib".
So final modules installation directory path will be: sites/all/modules/contrib.
01Working with admin menu
Admin menu provides a theme-independent administration interface (aka. "navigation", "back-end"). It's a helper for novice users coming from other CMS, a time-saver for site administrators, and useful for developers and site builders.
Suppose you want to enable a module. What you have to do is: Click Administer->Site building->Modules (figure02). You need 3 steps, but using admin menu you need just 1 (figure03)
02Working with module filter
This is realy amazing module to search one module or similiar modules among hundreds of available module
Create a sample page
Before doing anything create a sample page. Click Create content and then click page. Give title "sample page" and some dummy data to body page. Finally hit Save at the bottom. If this is your first content, then url will be: http://localhost/d6test/node/1
03Working with Path Auto
Automatically generates URL/path aliases for various contents. Since pathauto depends on path (drupal6 code optional module) and token, go to module list page (Administer->Site building->Modules) and enable these 3 (path, pathauto, token) modules.
Now edit any content and check "Automatice alias" inside URL Path settings sections (figure 07), hit save button and look at your URL. It is now user friendly and meaningfull.
04Working with Backup migrate
Back up and restore your Drupal MySQL database and files or migrate a site between environments. Backup and Migrate supports gzip, bzip and zip compression as well as automatic scheduled backups.
BONUSWorking with devel module
Though it is for module developers and themers, i included this modules only for generating contents for beginers. Using this module, we can create as many pages as we want with just a click. For this, go to Administer->Generates items->Generate content.
05Working with views module
Views have variety of uses. Please visit views module page to know detail.
Suppose we already created more than 10 page / articles. Now we want to dispaly title of all pages in either a block or in a page link.
Create a new view named "page_list", views descriptoin "View List of pages" and view type "node". Now click next button. In the view edit page configure your views as below:
Now either click on Page list menu from top right corner or visit block page (Administer->Site building->block) and assign page list block on sidebar left. You will see your your desired content (figure 09)
