Drupal Tips

I've compiled a list of Drupal Tips for newbies. These should cover the most common situations that arise when you are configuring your new Drupal social networking site:

• To get rid of that ugly error, click on status report and run cron manually.
• Learn how to setup cron jobs on your server or use the poormanscron module.
• Turn on Clean URLs.
• Change info in Site Information to include SEO keywords.
• With modules, upload them, enable them, go to access control and give permissions for all modules. Then you can go to admin and you should see options for each module. Also some modules will create blocks that you can use in your sidebars.
• Drupal has quite a few stats options for traffic and advertising, enable those.
• Set the proper date and time.
• Setup your menus with keywords and use these for each menu item path user (login), event (calendar), forum (forum), image (gallery), contact (contact form), video (videos), etc. no need for the URL, just use the word.
• You can use the news aggregator to feed in RSS feeds from other sites.
• You'll have to have a API for Snap, Google Analytics and Adwords you'll have to use the information from their site.
• You can also use Mybloglog, technorati, alexa, feedburner, sitemeter, etc. to add widgets/blocks to the sidebars.
• Disable content types Page and Story.
• I'd click on everything under Admin, configure each one.
• You can add modules at any time, make sure you test any new modules on a test site.
• Drupal.org has a great forum, use that with any support questions. It is great!!
• Go to users settings and enable author photos.
• Go to themes, configure, enable user pictures in posts and you can control the logo, favicon, slogan, mission, etc.
• Go to Admin, Profile the profile page is very important, this is where you define what the user can enter about themselves, plan this page carefully.
• You can enable the author information block which will show the users profile next to their articles .

I think this will be a series, because I have the strange feeling that I'll think of a bunch more right after I hit the submit button. If you have any Drupal Tips, please post them in the comments.

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