Three Great Drupal Tips and Tricks for Beginners

Posted on by Liquid Web | Updated:
Home > Blog > Solutions > Three Great Drupal Tips and Tricks for Beginners

Three Great Drupal Tips and Tricks for Beginners
Ask three professionals which content management system on the web is the best option, and you are likely to get three different answers. Which CMS works for your organization is largely a matter of preference. For some, WordPress or Magento are the superior option, while others prefer Joomla or Drupal.

Today, we are discussing Drupal. drupal-icon

A powerful open source content management platform, Drupal is built with modularity in mind. With easy content authoring, great performance, and excellent security, it is also one of the most flexible on the market, rivalling even some of the market leaders in that regard. This means that when you are considering what you want to do with it, the sky is the limit.

What I am about to go over only scratches the surface of what you can do – a few Drupal tips and tricks to get you started on one of the web’s greatest content management systems.

Take Control of Spam

Especially if you are running a community site, you are no stranger to spam. In addition to clogging up your site with needless clutter, it represents a significant security risk. Luckily, Drupal equips you with a number of powerful modules and built-in features to keep your pages spam-free. In addition to installing Akismet and spamicide, you can also do the following:

  • Install the Flag Abuse module to help your own users police the site
  • Block or moderate user registrations to require administrator approval
  • Require email verification on newly-created accounts
  • Install a geoblocker to protect against spam domains
  • Use Role Delay to gradually drip-feed permissions to new users
  • Use Ban and Unpublish to simplify removal of spambot users

Optimize Everything for Search

One of the core components of a website’s success involves how well it’s optimized for search. Luckily, Drupal includes a great selection of features that let you take care of everything you need in that regard. These include:

Override Stylesheets to Better Match Your Site’s Design

Last but certainly not least, imagine you have a module that makes use of a particular stylesheet. Unfortunately, it is one that meshes relatively poorly with your site’s overall layout. Believe it or not, you can actually choose to override that module’s stylesheet, and instead use one of your choosing.

The process is a bit complicated. First, place a file with the name of the css you want to override in your current theme’s folder. Next, simply add the following entry to your site’s .info file:

stylesheets[all][] = cssname.css

Learn more about how to do this in Drupal 7.

These Drupal Tips and Tricks Are Just the Beginning

This is only a very brief overview of Drupal that is just meant to get you started. There is much, much more to the system than we have discussed here. Drupal provides an easy way to manage your website’s content – and if you pair Drupal with a powerful and easy to use hosting platform, like Cloud Sites (which allows you to manage multiple technologies and applications all from one account) you can simplify your website management even further. Want to learn more? Let us know!