By JaymeNYC on

I've been reading about theming all day and learning what does what with all the php files. I don't know where to start at all so I can start developing my site. I installed the aBeesParadise to take a look at it, but wheres the site? it seems like I'm looking at the backend the whole time. I clicked Create Content and tried page/story to see what the site would look lke if i wrote somethin and I did, but still even in another browser when I'm not logged in it seems like its the backend side.

What I'm asking is how do I develop the front end of the site? If this is it, what am I suppose to change?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

hectorplus’s picture

hectorplus commented

Anything you publish will be promoted to the front page, sort of what you see here, if you want to customize the front or home page, take a look at the views module.

Amigopost.com
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cog.rusty’s picture

cog.rusty commented

Drupal does not have a backend.

What users see depends on their user role(s) and the permissions which have been given to the user role(s).

People who are not administrators don't see the Administration menu. People who don't have permissions for editing don't see an Edit tab, nor can they use its URL.

This way is more suitable for community sites, where some people post some kinds of content, some take care of the users etc, and what is or what is not administration is not so clear. Other CMSs consider that writing an article is a backend activity, but Drupal does not.

JaymeNYC’s picture

JaymeNYC commented

Would drupal be good for an entertainment website? I would need a latest news section which is sorta like recent blog posts.. Do I do that through a module?

And is there anything that describes how to put a template together? I've read alot about all the different php files and what all that does, but I'm confused on how it all works together still.

cog.rusty’s picture

cog.rusty commented

Any kind of site is fine with Drupal.

By default, Drupal's front page displays all kinds of latest posts which are "Published" and "Promoted" (these choices appear in the "Publishing options" when you are editing a post).

There are many ways to create a "latest news" section which displays the latest of a specific kind of posts. For example, if the content type of your news is "story" (created using "Create content -> story"), then you can install the http://drupal.org/project/get_content_type module which will make available the URL node/type/story for your news section.

By the way, you can also change Drupal's front page to show only those stories, or just a single post of your own. To do this, go to admin/settings/site-information and change the "Default front page" (which is now "node") to any Drupal URL you want.

About theming in Drupal 6, take a look at http://drupal.org/node/171179 This takes some learning, so you are better off using and modifying an existing theme for a while. In short, page.tpl.php is the template of a full Drupal page and node.tpl.php is the template of a single post inside the page (either it appears alone in a page or listed together with other posts).

The templates use php to print some variables which come from Drupal.

http://api.drupal.org/api/function/template_preprocess_page
Scroll down that page to see the variables available for printing in page.tpl.php

http://api.drupal.org/api/function/template_preprocess_node
The variables available in node.tpl.php are defined here.

You can modify those tpl.php files, or you can create your own template files with the right names. Then they will be used instead of the default ones in some special cases.