Drupal Tutorials: Installing modules and themes

Drupal tutorial - installing modules and themes

Now that you have clean Drupal install it's time to start customizing. The best way for this is to look for the modules that will give your site the functionality you want it to have and then grab a theme that looks nice and fits your needs.

The first thing you should do is to go to Drupal's main site and take a look at the available themes and modules. Pick the ones that you want and download them to your desktop; be careful to download the versions that match you installation - modules for Drupal 4.7 will have a "4.7-" in the name and ones for Drupal 5.x will have a "5.x-" in the filename.

So, now that you have the files on your desktop follow the next steps:

1. Log into your websites' CPanel and click on File Manager.

2. Browse with the file manager to Drupal's themes directory (it's in yoursite.com/themes) and then click on "Upload file(s)".

3. For each file that you want to upload click on one of the browse buttons, select the file and then click on "Open". After you have selected all the files click on the "Upload button" on your browser and in a few moments the files will be uploaded. Make sure that you don't mix them up and upload the wrong files in the wrong folders.

4. Do the same for your modules (the modules directory is at yoursite.com/modules).

5. Now you have to extract the files from the archives. Go to the modules and themes directories, click on an archive and then select "Extract file contents" from the links that appear in the top right part of the webpage. Do this for every archive, both modules and themes.

You should log out of CPanel, you won't need it anymore.

6. Go to your site and log in to the Drupal administration interface. To see what modules you have uploaded go to Administer -> Site building -> Modules. You will see a few lists depending on what modules are on the server; the modules I uploaded are Meta tags, Pathauto and Webform and are in the "Others" list.

Under each module description you'll see what module dependencies are - for example Pathauto depends on the Path module so I will have to enable them both to use them. Check the boxes near the corresponding modules and then click on "Save configuration" to enable them.

After the modules are enabled you can configure them from the Administer -> Site configuration page.

7. To see the themes you have installed go to Administer -> Site building -> Themes. You'll be presented with a list of the themes that are on your server; to enable them you have to check the boxes, but as a super-admin you can activate them even if they aren't enabled.

If they are enabled, at the right of the themes will appear a "Configure" link that lets you enable or disable certain elements like site name, favicon, search box, logo and upload a custom logo or favicon.

source: http://needforcontent.com