When upgrading Drupal core, we need to do the following standard steps:

1. Back-up your database, or better, back-up everything, including your files and directory structure.
2. Set your site to offline mode
3. Switch your theme to Garland
4. Disable all contributed modules (not the optional core modules)
5. Delete the previous Drupal files but do not remove the sites folder, .htaccess file and robot.txt file.
6. Upload the new Drupal version but be careful not to overwrite sites folder, .htaccess file and robot.txt file.
7. Re-enable again all contributed modules that you use.
8. Run update: http://yoursite.com/update.php
9. Switch back to your theme
10. Set your site to online mode

I found the steps above less risky in doing the upgrade. I never encounter any upgrade error with those steps. Note however that I am talking an upgrade of the same Drupal release, ie, from Drupal 6.17 to 6.19 not from 5.21 to 6.19.

Content Construction Kit (CCK) gives you more control of a new content type. By default, Drupal will allow you to create new content type. This feature makes Drupal very flexible, and CCK adds more power to it. To understand CCK, let us say your site contains blog, story, and pages. Now you want to create a product list, the list contains a picture, price, description, etc. Although there are many ways to accomplish this, let us say we want to accomplish this with the use of CCK. All we need to do is to create a new content type and add fields to it. Your field maybe one or more of the following; picture, price, description, etc.

Written by merlinofchaos, Views module of Drupal is one of the modules with high usage statistics. Many Drupal developer said that Drupal is not Drupal without Views and CCK modules. I can say that they are correct. In my previous post, I mentioned slightly what Views can do in your Drupal powered site.

I think it's already months since Drupal released the alpha version of Drupal 7. Of course, it is not intended for production site, the purpose of the release is for the community to test and to find more bugs. As a Drupal enthusiast, I installed Drupal 7.0 into my local machine to see whats new.

I previously announced that I am self-studying PHP. While reading some good resources, I remember things I've done with PHP. I even laugh with myself knowing how I developed my skill of copy-pasting codes. One particular code I copied (then pasted) is the custom login to a Drupal website. I cannot recall what particular page of Drupal.org did I get this code but I am using it now. I am not the author of this snippet, credit must go to the author. As of this moment, I am not in the mood of searching the Drupal.org vast database, my apology.

Now that I am studying PHP programming, I remember my old post in Drupal.org community. I was building the Engineering Forums at that time and I made the forums as the front page. By default, the front page of Drupal is "node" or http://www.example.com/node. To set the front page to different page, simply replace "node" with the path of your page. Example; if you want "Forums" as your front page, replace the "node" with "forums". To configure it, go to admin/settings/site-information.

By default, Drupal will put (not verified) to all entries made by some Anonymous users. This feature is what makes Drupal great for community websites. However, many found it annoying for single user site that accepts Anonymous commenting. The solution however is simple and there are plenty of ways to do it. The simplest way I think is to use a template that is having this feature. Most themes from TopNotchThemes are having this feature like the Acquia Slate and Acquia Marina.

This post is about how I configure this blog RTFVerterra.com, a Drupal powered blog.

Most Drupal themes (or maybe all) has no ability to insert block between node and comment. In most themes, the common arrangement is the following:

Recently, Google announce that they will use site speed in web search ranking. Site speed according to Google "reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests". For our website to go high in search ranking, we need to reduce the load time, thus speeding up the site response.

I found Drupal very light weight when used for a single-user blog. When properly configured, you will have fast loading blog. The default installation of Drupal is actually enough to handle your blog but to gain more control, we are going to tweak it a little so that Drupal will behave like a normal blog. This post will assume that you have a fresh installed Drupal site. If you want to know how to install Drupal, refer to my previous post, How to Install Drupal CMS to Your Server.

This discussion will cover the following: core modules to install, contributed modules to install, using the Taxonomy module, and harnessing the power of Views.