By villarrealsj on

Hello,

I am a new user of Drupal. I'm excited to see what Drupal can do for my site called www.onemindanyweapon.com, which I plan to build into a community for US Marines involved in the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program and Mixed Martial Arts enthusiasts. Through my host provider, AQHost, I was ablt to use Fantastico and have Drupal installed automatically, which is great for me since I am not very tech savvy. However, I am running into a few problems:

1. The colors I want to use in my theme will be Red, Black and White. Similar to https://www.tbs.usmc.mil/Pages/MA/default.htm, but I plan to make it much cleaner looking and functional.

2. I have downloaded many of the modules I feel will work great with my site, but I cannot find the instructions to install them. Can someone provide any guidance?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

R/S
Sammy
www.onemindanyweapon.com(coming soon)

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

heine’s picture

heine commented

The handbook contains a general page on Installing new modules. Most modules come with a (rudimentary) INSTALL.txt with specific instructions. It basically comes down to

1. READ INSTALL.TXT
2. Copy files in the archive to the directory modules/modulename
3. Execute queries in the included SQL file(s)
4. Enable the module
5. Configure the module

Tip: install one module at a time. The use of a test site is highly recommended.

As to one: depending on the extend of modification you need, you can get away with simply editing style.css of an existing theme. Start with a theme that matches the design of your site. If you require more controle over Drupals output you'll have to look into themeing with PHPTemplate. Fortunately there's a Theme developers guide. The page Theming overview describing engines & styles is perhaps interesting as well.

Because you're using 4.7 beta / CVS PHPTemplate is the most interesting theme engine.

Good luck.

PS You're title has a nasty case of Capslockitis...

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villarrealsj’s picture

villarrealsj commented

Heine,

First, thank you for responding with the helpful info.

I figured the files were compressed somehow, but when I try to open it with WinZip, it doesn't work. Any suggestions on unzipping the files?

Also, my apologies for the Capslickitis... I like that term. In the Marine Corps, we always capitalize our Subjects. Not sure why, just always have, so it's a force of habit.

PS: Know of anyone or anywhere I can find someone help me setup my site how I want it? Being aboard ship makes it difficult to access the internet sometimes.

At the moment, our unit is providing assistance to the Philippine Government for the mudslide. If you watch the news, the Marines you see.. yup, some of those are my guys!

Take Care.
Sammy

heine’s picture

heine commented

Winzip should be perfectly fine for unzipping the archive, were it not for the fact that Internet Explorer gets a little creative on the file's extension; change the archive's extension back to .tar.gz and Winzip should be confused no longer.

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When your problem is solved, please post a follow-up to the thread you started.

sangamreddi’s picture

sangamreddi commented

IF you don't like the existing looks and need unique looks either you create a theme yourself or get hire a designer Go through the theme developers handbook, its easy theming with drupal.

All the best

Sunny                      
www.gleez.com | www.sandeepone.com

Earths Daughter’s picture

Earths Daughter commented

I tried installing a module just to see what doing it was like, although I'm not ready to start building a site yet. I have a lot more to study about Drupal before I will be ready to start building.

SInce your web host is considerate enough to provide Fantastico to make things easy for you, maybe they have installed PHPMyAdmin, as well. I'm a non-technical person also, and I managed to use PHPMyAdmin to successfully import the database for the module I installed, and it worked just fine. In fact, it went easier than I thought it would. I had never done anything with a database before. If you're reasonably intelligent, you can learn how to use Drupal, don't let it scare you off, lol.

To change the color of a theme, pick one with the color determined by CSS. It's a lot easier to understand CSS enough to do that than to learn PHP. Then just change the color in the CSS references.

By the way, I found out installing Drupal is deceptively easy. That was the easy part, it gets harder from there. You will have to do a lot of studying to get the hang of Drupal. But if you want a site that can grow into a major one, has a lot of content, and is search engine friendly, Drupal is the way to go.

A CMS is intended to be something a technical person sets up, then non-technical people can use without knowing all the technical stuff. So you're going to have to learn some technical stuff, or bribe a techie friend with gadgets and pizza, or hire a Drupal designer to set your site up for you. Once it's up, it won't be that complicated to use.