To Blog or Not to Blog? When new site builders want to set up a personal journal or blogging site, they often turn to the Blog module that comes with Drupal. However, sometimes that’s not the best choice. To understand whether the module is right for your needs, we’ll take a quick look at what features it adds: • A new content type, called “Blog” • An overview page of all the blog posts on the site, at http://www.example.com/blog • An overview page of all the blog posts by each user, at http://www.example.com/ blog/1, where 1 is the user’s account ID • Links at the bottom of each blog post to the author’s list of posts • A filtered RSS feed for each user’s blog list of blog posts • A private “My Blog” link in the navigation menu for each user who has permission to create blog posts If you’re building a site where one user’s posts will be the primary content, all the extra pages and links from the Blog module are a distraction. It’s simpler and less cluttered to create a custom content type called “Blog post” and leave the module turned off. If you’re setting up a site where those posts are just one of several kinds of content, and multiple users will be posting entries, it’s a great choice. That’s why we’ll be using it on Mom and Pop, Inc.’s site!
1. Go to Administer→Site building→Modules (admin/build/modules) and enable the core Blog module. Click “Save configuration” when finished. This will add a new content type called “Blog entry” for Mike and Jeanne to post. 2. As a general best practice, anytime we enable a new module, we should go to the Administer→User management→Permissions (admin/user/permissions) screen to configure the module’s access control. We can take a look to see what permissions have been added to the list, but in our case we don’t need to set any of the new permissions here. Both Jeanne and Mike already have the “administer nodes” permission, which automatically grants them the rights provided by the Blog module, so we can leave it alone. 3. Before creating any blog entries, let’s set up our site’s taxonomy. Go to Administer→Content management→Taxonomy (admin/content/taxonomy). 4. First, let’s create a vocabulary for classifying the type of news item that’s being posted. Click Add vocabulary (admin/content/taxonomy/add/vocabulary), enter the settings from Table 2-18 as shown in Figure 2-39, and click Save.
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