Building a Programmers Blog

Building a Programmers Blog: Scheduled Posts

Submitted by Bevan on Sat, 4 Sep 2010 - 8:00am

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.

Building a Programmers Blog: What to deploy

Submitted by Bevan on Sat, 28 Aug 2010 - 8:00am

One piece of feedback I've received about this series of posts was about a simple thing that I'd overlooked: If you got your site up and running using an all-in-one installer, such as the one from Acquia, how do you know what you need to deploy when you want to go-live.

Building a Programmers Blog: Theming

Submitted by Bevan on Sat, 21 Aug 2010 - 8:00am

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.

Building a Programmers Blog: Blocks

Submitted by Bevan on Sat, 14 Aug 2010 - 8:00am

Blocks are a fundamental part of the way that Drupal structures your site. Blocks are placed into regions around your main content to provide additional information and navigation.

Building a Programmers Blog: Markdown

Submitted by Bevan on Sat, 31 Jul 2010 - 8:00am

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.

Building a Programmers Blog: Friendly URLs

Submitted by Bevan on Sat, 24 Jul 2010 - 8:00am

According to the experts in search engine optimization (SEO), it is quite important that your site URLs are informative and well structured. The Drupal defaults leave something to be desired in this area. Fortunately, Drupal provides easy support for improving your URL structure.

Building a Programmers Blog: Enabling Blog Posts

Submitted by Bevan on Sat, 17 Jul 2010 - 8:00am

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.

Building a Programmers Blog: Module Installation

Submitted by Bevan on Fri, 9 Jul 2010 - 8:00am

This post is less of a tutorial and more of a reference that you'll find useful as you read future posts.

Expansion of Drupal - adding new features and capabilities - is primarily done by adding new modules. Installing a Drupal module is a relatively simple procedure, but there are a few issues of which you should be aware.

Series Content

Building a Programmers Blog: Installing Drupal

Submitted by Bevan on Fri, 2 Jul 2010 - 8:00am

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.

Series Content

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.

Building a Programmers Blog: Why Drupal?

Submitted by Bevan on Fri, 25 Jun 2010 - 8:56am

Drupal is a mature, extensible, actively supported and secure content management system for the web, and an excellent base for publishing a technical blog.

In this series of articles, I'll guide you through setting up a programming blog through Drupal.