Drupal Themes by ThemeShark.com

The following guide is for use with the Stingray Drupal Theme available for purchase here.

This guide will assist you in setting up Stingray and it’s additional features on a pre-existing website or from scratch. Although we recommend that users new to Drupal install the theme using our custom installation profile, that takes care of all of this for you in a few simple clicks, we understand that this might not always be ideal. But if you’ve never heard of the CCK, Views and Imagecache modules before today, we recommend that you proceed with caution and much patience. ;)

And as always, before doing anything to a pre-existing site, make sure to BACKUP.

So let’s get rollin’.

1A. Install Drupal if you haven’t already. Make sure mod_rewrite is enabled, we’ll need to use Clean Urls for this.

Today we’re starting a new series of Drupal tutorials here on ThemeShark.com that will focus on Drupal development for newer users - people who may be moving on from other popular CMS solutions like Wordpress or Joomla or just don’t have much experience or professional history in site development to begin with.

It’s no secret by now that Drupal is one of the most powerful open-source solutions available for building everything from tiny personal blogs to larger corporate content sites, and we want to make sure that no one’s overwhelmed right off the bat before getting the chance to dig in and really find out what the CMS has to offer. So our goal here will be to guide green users in building a straight-forward content site that utilizes the most common and useful Drupal modules and offers features common to most Web 2.0 era websites.

Today I just want to highlight a couple of excellent modules that will help new Drupal users who may be coming from other CMS solutions like Joomla make the transition a little bit more smoothly.  There's no doubt that Drupal provides a powerful and flexible platform - but let's address a couple of the issues that seem to confuse people right off of the bat.