Week 7 - Wednesday - Progress Report

Finished designing the webpage in Photoshop. Ready to start creating the Drupal theme next week.

New groups of layers created this week:

The 'container' group, which contains the 'main content' and 'sidebar' groups. The 'sidebar' includes 'search' and 'login' forms.

The 'footer' group, which contains navigation links, links to social media and copyright disclaimer.

Week 7 - Progress

Continued with the tutorial on building a drupal theme using photoshop. Completed Welcome section and columns. Below is a screenshot of the theme so far.

Getting an understanding of the structure of a theme and how Drupal will interpret the photoshop file. The structure of groups and layers is starting to make sense. Here is the structure i created today.

Week 6 - Progress Report

Began work on a tutorial on how to deisgn your own Drupal theme in Photoshop.

http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/tutorials/complete-websites/design-a-drupal-business-theme-in-photoshop/

Completed to step 11 in class. Below is a screenshot of the theme so far.

Week 5 - wednesday session

I have not been able to find a solution to the Fatal Error I encountered last session. After reading some comments on the Drupal website I think it may be conflict with another service running on the iMac. As I already have it running at home on my PC I don't think I will go any further with this installation.

For the remander of this lesson I have decided to go over some HTML and CSS tutorials.

After reviewing some HTML tutorials I made a new HTML document in dreamweaver and entered a title, heading and paragraph. Then I made a new CSS and added some new attributes for the h1 and p tags. I linked the html document to the style sheet and the changes took effect. I spent the rest of the session adding new tags and changing attributes to see what happened.

Monday - Week 5 - Progress Report

Resolved issue with file permissions from last week.

Continued with installation of Drupal without issue until the final step of the installation.

Encountered the following error message:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function field_attach_load() in /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/htdocs/drupal/includes/entity.inc on line 321

I thought it might be because it isn't connected to the internet so I plugged in the ethernet cable and reload the page, but it wouldn't do anything at all then just stalled on the page.

Installing Drupal

unzip the drupal.zip file to the directory

/XAAMP/htdocs/drupal

This will be your root directory. From this point onwards in this documentation all paths will start from this root directory. 

copy the file 

./sites/default/default.settings.php 

to 

./sites/default/settings.php 

Make sure that in your drupal directory the file ...

./sites/default/settings.php 

... is unlocked and all three levels of privileges are set to "Read & Write". 

Then create a new folder...

./sites/default/files

... unlocked and with "Read & Write" privileges.

More info about settings.php

Open a browser and go to the url

localhost/drupal

This worked fine on my Windows PC, but I had some trouble on the Mac and had to unplug my ethernet cable for it to work.

select 'Standard Installation' then 'Save and Continue'

select 'English' then 'Save and Continue'

Database Configuration:

Enter the information here that you used when you created your MySQL Database using phpMyAdmin. If your not sure log into phpMyAdmin and check. 

for this exercise use the following info:

Database type = MySQL

Database name = drupal

Database user = drupal

Database Password = password

Notice that under 'Advanced Options' the Database host is set to 'localhost' by default. 

'Save and Continue'

Configure site:

Pretty straight forward just enter the name for you site email address username, password and country.

'Save and Continue'

Week 4 progress report

I have the installed XAAMP and have the Apache and MySQL servers running.
Installed phpMyAdmin and created a new user called drupal
I have started the drupal install, but still having some issues with file permissions.

Create a new MySQL database for Drupal to use

Now that the MySQL service is started you can build your database so that Drupal has somewhere to store the content for your webpage. You will need a client to administer your database. We will be using 'phpMyAdmin' as our MySQL client.

Download phpMyAdmin

unzip phpMyAdmin and copy the contents to the htdocs folder located in the XAAMP program directory.

Follow these step from the Drupal Installation Guide

" This presumes you have root access to phpMyAdmin

1. Log in to phpMyAdmin as the root user.
2. Click Privileges and Add a new User OR you can use root user credential as well..
3. In the User name field, enter the username you wish to use.
4. In the Host field, select Local which is more secure, unless you will be accessing the database with this user from another server.
5. Enter or generate a password for the user.
6. In the Database for User list, select Create database with same name and grant all privileges and click Go. "

Setup a test server on your computer

The first thing you need to do is setup an Apache web server on your computer. This will allow you to build your Drupal website locally and then upload it to the your web hosting service when it is finished.  You will also need to setup a MySQL database so that Drupal can store the content of your website.

XAAMP is http hosting software which will allow you to run an Apache web server and a MySQL database on you local computer in the one application.

Download and install XAAMP

Once you have installed XAAMP open the application. On the control panel click the 'START' buttons for Apache and MySQL. This will start the Apache server and MySQL so that you can begin your install of Drupal.

Building a website using the Drupal Content Management System (CMS).

Welcome to my blog on building a website using the Drupal CMS. In this blog I will explain the steps I have taken to build a Website using Drupal. 

To find out more about Drupal go to the website -->  http://drupal.org/about .