Sam's blog

Project management is a tool that businesses must use in order to keep projects running to schedule and to budget. I had a look round for a suitable Drupal 7 alternative to this, and all I could find was a version which is compatible with Drupal 5. Project management, if done correctly can save the organization money and also can be used to generate more revenue if implemented correctly.  

I have taken most of the inspiration for this article from the following pages:

1. Download the latest version of Drupal core from www.drupal.org. [At the time of writing this is version 7.9]. You will need to extract the files locally on your hard drive before uploading them.

2. Create a MySQL database and a user for that database. Grant the created user all rights and permissions to the database.

3. Create a folder on your FTP server and upload the extracted files to this folder.

With Drupal being highly configurable and scalable, setting up a blog and posting to that blog is very easy to do. By default, the blog module is included and distributed with the latest release of Drupal core. To take advantage of this functionality, all a user needs to do is to download the latest version of core and install it on a web server.

The concept of creating a custom tpl.php file was a bit daunting to begin with, although there are a large number of tutorials and articles out there on how to create these files. A quick look around the Drupal community for community contributed “layout modules”, resulted in a few modules which reduced the complexity of this task.