[CALUG] Recommendations for a CMS

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 05/10/2011 07:38 AM, Joe wrote:
> "CMS:MS sites take us two or three days to develop, Drupal sites take about 
> a week but require less maintenance in the long run."
> 
> Can you recommend any online resources or books that can help me understand 
> Drupal and make my time getting started in the muck down to a week?

Most of the online resources seem to be videos. All of the books are
out-of-date. The best advice I have would be to set up a fresh install
of Drupal 7 and make yourself a site with it. Force yourself to use
content/views until you realize why you'd want to.

Here's my current checklist for new (minimal) D7 installs. This should
get you to a point where you can create and modify pages, at least.
Forgive the obvious copy/paste formatting issues.


Disallow New User Creation

Most clients who require a CMS don't want to allow new user
registrations, but these are enabled by default. Turn them off as soon
as possible. From the admin section,

   1. Choose Configuration.
   2. Choose People.
   3. Choose Account Settings.
   4. Select "Administrators only" under "Who can register accounts?"
   5. Save the new settings.

Enable the Menu Module

The minimal installation leaves the Menu module disabled; you should
enable it.

Create a site administrator Role

   1. Choose Administration.
   2. Choose People (not under the configuration menu).
   3. Click the Permissions tab.
   4. Select Roles.
   5. Add a role named "site administrator"
   6. Optionally grant all permissions to the new role.

Create a Full HTML Input Format

   1. Choose Configuration.
   2. Choose Content authoring.
   3. Choose Text formats.
   4. Add a new format.
   5. Name it "Full HTML," and allow site administrators (created in the
previous step) to use it. Leave everything else unchecked.

Add a Content Type for Pages

   1. Choose Structure.
   2. Choose Content Types.
   3. Create a new Content Type.
   4. Name it "Page"
   5. Uncheck "Promoted to front page" under publishing options.
   6. Uncheck "Display author and date information" under display options.

Path Settings

   1. Download and install the Token and Pathauto modules.
   2. Choose Configuration, Search and Metadata," and URL Aliases from
the menu.
   3. (Optional) Go to the Settings subsection. Personally, I prefer to
use an underscore as the default separator. When doing so, it is useful
to change the actions for hyphen and underscore to "do not replace."
   4. (Optional) Remove all of the words from the list of "strings to
remove."
   5. Check all of the options on the "Bulk update" tab and save your
settings.

IMCE

   1. Download and install the IMCE module.
   2. Go to Configuration->Media->IMCE.
   3. Delete the Sample Profile profile.
   4. Add a new profile titled site administrators.
   5. Disable the file/directory size quotas by setting them to "0".
There are still PHP limits in effect preventing users from abusing the
server too hard.
   6. Add "pdf ps dvi svg txt" and possibly "doc docx xls xlsx ppt pptx"
to the list of allowed file extensions.
   7. Disable the maximum image resolution.
   8. Set the maximum number of files per operation to something greater
than one. Five seems about right.
   9. Grant access to all of sites/default/files/ and its subdirectories.
  10. Save your changes, and return to the IMCE menu.
  11. Assign the new profile to the site administrators role.
  12. (Optional) Under Common Settings, change the "Default behavior for
existing files during file uploads" to "Replace the existing file with
the new one."

CKEditor (without WYSIWYG)

   1. Download and extract the CKEditor module.
   2. Download CKEditor and extract it in to the
/sites/default/modules/ckeditor/ directory.
   3. Enable the module.
   4. Grant at least one role the access ckeditor permission.
   5. In Site Configuration -> CKEditor, delete the "Advanced" role and
edit the one that defaults to Full HTML (the input format created earlier).
   6. # Under "Advanced options," force pasting as plain text.
   7. # Under "CSS," choose "Define CSS," and enter
%tstylesheets/ckeditor.css into the path (you should create this
stylesheet eventually).
   8. # Under "File browser settings," choose IMCE for the link dialog
browser.