SILO S ON DRUPAL DRUPAL ON SILO S

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1 SILO S ON DRUPAL DRUPAL ON SILO S To dive right in to the matter, drupal is the best cms in disguise, simply because it is light weight and very customizable in many ways. Straight out of the box, drupal can do a lot of things already however when you do the first install, there is hardly anything there but with 2 minutes looking at what to turn on, it is quite easy to create a silo website. I have my website called which I will use to demo on how to create a full silo website. What you need is: 1. the drupal distribution ( 2. the pathauto module ( 3. the sitemenu module ( What would be nice also: 4. the tinymce module ( for wysiwyg editing 5. the nodewords module ( for meta tags 6. the urllist module ( the yahoo url list 7. the gsitemap module ( the google sitemap I have a number of other modules activated as well but these will do for now. Once you have the initial install up and running which should be fairly straightforward if you follow the readme s, you will need to check on modules, which is listed under the admin menu and then modules. The following optional modules have to be turned on as a bare minimum next to the required ones already turned on: contact - Enables the use of both personal and site-wide contact forms. menu - Allows administrators to customize the site navigation menu. page - Enables the creation of pages that can be added to the navigation system. path - Allows users to rename URLs. pathauto - Provides a mechanism for modules to automatically generate aliases for the content they manage. sitemenu - Site map page and block menu, based on taxonomy taxonomy - Enables the categorization of content.

2 Let first check on the settings for the website under admin menu and then settings. Under the section General Settings, you will find the following option for the rewriting of URL s. What you see here is from my own website which already passed the clean url test. With a fist time install you will have to run the clean url test first before being able to turn it on. Once you passed the test, the option will look like the image below and you can turn on the clean urls. Then the next item to do is to generate the categories for your website which are the terms for you silo. In my case I started building the website without proper research as a test case for building silos on top of drupal. Drupal has a categorization function called taxonomy, which you will find under the admin menu and then categories. I ve created a vocabulary called Website Categories which hold my terms. To create a vocabulary, simply click on add vocabulary and fill in the required information. I would obviously select page for type, hierarchy to be single and make it required. The rest of the options are not necessary.

3 To show my categories, I list my terms from the main category screen: and here the categories for my website. You can create a similar list simply by using the add term option. Then what I have done is the following, I have given each of these categories an alias which represent the landing page for each of the terms: By now you should recognize the structure that I m building. Next item is the pathauto module which is going to help to make sure that the pages that I will be building, will be placed in the correct category with the proper URL. So head over to settings which you can find under admin settings, then settings and pathauto.

4 First the general settings. As a separator use the underscore rather than the hyphen, leave all the other default choices. Next is the more important section of node settings. Drupal considers each piece of content a node, which could be a blog, a page, a story or any number of choice, depending on what you have turned on, but I mostly just use pages.

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6 Now what I have set up here is how each node gets its URL. Further on the page are the explanations of what the coding means but as I will show later when actually creating a page, this setting will determine the url by which category it is being submitted in and what the title on the page is. The previous general settings will make sure the title part of the url is separated with underscores so by creating a page called Theme Zoom SEO/SEM Research and Content Decision Tool and submitting it to the category seo/sem, the pathauto module created the url: tent_decision_tool.htm Moving on to the page creation itself, I created the homepage of my website simply by going to create content and then page from the menu. I ve written the text with the proper links to the various subsections of which I know the urls already. And after submitting this piece of content, I can go back in set this as my homepage.

7 I going to admin and settings and I m selecting the general section as before. Instead of node I m setting my homepage as node/1 assuming that the content just created is indeed node/1. Now that I have done that I can start working on the menu.: These menu items were created using the primary links of drupal which you can find under admin and then menu:

8 To create these item click on add item or click add menu item from the top of the page and fill in the information: Make sure to select primary links from the parent item

9 Now on to the creation of a page, by doing of the same as before, create content and then page: Now that most of the settings are in place, I ve created this page with the proper title, category that it is submitted in and the content itself and I am set:

10 To create a sitemap for the website is fairly easy. Go to the settings under admin, settings and sitemenu.: The number of nodes to show will determine whether your sitemap shows just the main categories or all the pages beneath it. I have mine set to create the full sitemap which is shown here:

11 Next would be to create the standard footer for all of the pages. In order to do that Drupal has these blocks which can be left sidebars, right sidebars, headers, footers or could even be in the content area. You can find this under admin, settings and then blocks. I ve created a new block: And I have entered the info for the homepage, sitemap and contact information.

12 Then from the block overview page I ve set the block as a footer from the placement option. The next item to look at would be the theming of the website. I ve used one of the default themes with some modification but the most important change was the changing of the header tags since most themes have the title of page set as H2 instead of H1 Drupal is using a template system called phptemplate and it very easy to configure. The layout of the pages is mostly set in a file called page.tpl.php. In relation of the default drupal theme which is bluemarine, you can find in the file structure of your website under /themes/bluemarine. In the code look for <?php print $title?> and make sure that it is surrounded by H1 tags.