Building a Programmers Blog

One of the surprising omissions from Drupal Core is that of image handling. There are plenty of modules that provide different kinds of image support. And that, strangely enough, is the core of the problem.

Sometimes you don't want all of your content to post at one time. Instead of a flurry of posts at the weekend, when you have time to write them, it's better for your site (and your readers) if new posts appear at regular and consistent intervals. Scheduling posts in advance can help you do this.

If you're like most developers, you're pretty fussy about the way that things look, but you're probably not the hottest designer around. Fortunately, there are plenty of themes available for Drupal that give you a great look and feel with just a little work.

Out of the box, Drupal supports both partial and full HTML as input formats. Writing HTML markup for your blog isn't that difficult - but it does take both care and time.

Markdown, as popularized by the StackOverflow family of websites, is a simple text based way of writing for the web.

By default, Drupal comes with just two different node types - pages and stories. These two node types are useful in most cases - but not sufficient for all. In this post we'll look at how to use these two types, and how to activate the Blog module is supplied with Drupal core.

Having decided to use Drupal for our Programmers Blog, our first task is to get Drupal itself installed - after all, without it up and running, nothing else can happen.

I'm assuming that you're installing Drupal for your own use on a server you control - the typical situation for a test server on which you can "try out" ideas and changes. The steps necessary for installation of Drupal at hosting company for a public website will be different, with the exact steps dependant on the systems in use by your host.