This site is a Drupal site. I started with Drupal 4.6.8 and recently upgraded to Drupal 6. I find the best way to learn Drupal is to experiment with your own sites. Of course, using a sandbox (development area) is highly recommended for those large design adventures.
I have been keeping notes on the upgrade from D4 to D6. The images show the before and after. Not much has changed yet. The new theme is still in production.
My client for this site already had a Drupal site in place and wanted to build a second Drupal sites so that he could chronicle his green home building experience, to share what he has learned, and to inspire others.
We used the existing Drupal installation, thus creating a multi-site configuration. We reused the theme from the current site and simply edited to fit the look and feel he wanted for this site.
My responsibilities were:
This project grew from being one site to two sites. During the planning and requirements stages, it was revealed that most of the content for each site was the same.
The Sener Learning Services site is an ongoing development project. The first site was developed as a Dreamweaver site and included a blog and search.
When I discovered Drupal, I proposed that the client convert to a Drupal site.
Another way to customize a Drupal site is via its navigation. The menu structure that we will customize is the blocks. The primary links created using the admin/settings feature are shared by each site so they need to be common to each site. You want this to encourage a similar feel between the sites.
You can use the blocks to create custom navigation. To do this, you need to ensure that your taxonomy is set up to let you classify your records for use in one site versus the other, if needed.
Using Drupal themes out-of-the-box might not be enough to make the two sites unique enough. The next step is to customize the theme into something you can call your own. Some the themes require engines to run while others do not. In either case, there are typically two parts to a theme that you can customize, the file that calls out the layout or structure of the site pages and the file the defines the styles.
The guidance provided below assumes:
The guidance provided below assumes:
The processes that differ are the database setup and the settings.php configuration. This article focuses on the database setup. There are two parts to this process: create new tables and edit tables.
