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By Poincare_ on
Hi I chugged through the Drupal install and finally(!!) got my site up. I went through the how To: Single User Blog but my site isn't working properly. I searched all over and didn't find anything. Please help!!
When I create a new blog entry, I create a story that gets pushed to the front page. But I do not see any kind of "Blog Archive", "Blog roll", or "tags", or "Category" section on my menus.
Can someone please help me to figure out how to add these? I have tried to look everywhere in the Administer part of Drupal but I can't find anything. Please help...
Comments
Please, can someone help?
I'd really like to use Drupal but the support for a new person who is inexperienced with Drupal seems hard to come by. Please, is there anyone out there who can help me? Thank you.
> I went through the how To:
> I went through the how To: Single User Blog
Can you link to the tutorial you used.
> But I do not see any kind of "Blog Archive", "Blog roll", or "tags", or "Category" section on my menus.
I can't think why you'd expect to see any of that in your menu.
Not seeing those things is completely normal.
My initial thought is that you're following documentation that was specifically written for a special 'blog' INSTALL PROFILE, or for a very old version of Drupal.
The only thing you should see in your menu is a link called 'Blog' which links to a special 'teaser-list' (at /blog) that acts as a frontpage for all the bloggers on your site. This menu item might be disabled by default, so you might have to go to the menu section in the admin backend and enable it. Set up your menus properly whilst you're there - whether they display properly 'out of the box' is theme dependent.
BTW, waiting 10 hours for a reply is not unusual. I'd wait 16-24 hours before bumping a thread.
I don't know what you were expecting, but Drupal comes without any guarantee of support.
All support comes from other end users - beginners and experts alike.
However, quite often I'll be working on the problem after I post a question, and a good way to 'bump' your post is edit it to add new information gained from your own troubleshooting. Or sometimes I go back and read the question and decide it wasn't clear enough, and edit it for that reason. After editing, other people will see it at the top of the forum list with a 'new' or 'updated' tag.
blog
Hi, glad you got things working. To make the blog part work, goto, administer > site building > Modules
enable 'blog' in the core optional section
Then goto administer > user management > permissions
and look for the blog section to set the permissions..
Then goto create content > blog entry
new user help
@ Poincare_ Help is easy to get here, do a google search , like "site:drupal.org blog or (search words)"
and if you can't figure something out, you are welcome to use my contact form anytime.. always happy to help.
http://drupal.org/user/381695
recent blog posts block
@Poincare_ There is also a core block that goes with the blog module,
goto administer > Site building > blocks
look for the 'Recent blog posts' block and choose a region to display it, save the page.
then click the 'configure' link to the right of the block to set which pages it will be visible on and who can see it.
another cool module to add is author_pane
more info
The tutorial about setting up Drupal as a blog, which I am following, is from the Web Site Recipe section on drupal.org. The link is: http://drupal.org/node/41373
To all the people saying "just install the blog module..." well, several of the documentation pages that I read said NOT TO DO this. They said this is for multi-user systems, and I am just one person trying to use Drupal as a blog software, similar to something like WordPress (which was way easier to work with, so far).
So, because many of the documentation pages recommended not using the blog module, I did not install it. Have you people seen others, just a 1 person who is blogging, who is using the blog module, despite the drupal.org pages that recommend not to do this?
Just trying to do what people recommend since I'm super non-technical and not that experienced with web stuff.
To the guy that said:
...
The only thing you should see in your menu is a link called 'Blog' which links to a special 'teaser-list' (at /blog) that acts as a frontpage for all the bloggers on your site. This menu item might be disabled by default, so you might have to go to the menu section in the admin backend and enable it. Set up your menus properly whilst you're there - whether they display properly 'out of the box' is theme dependent.
BTW, waiting 10 hours for a reply is not unusual. I'd wait 16-24 hours before bumping a thread.
I don't know what you were expecting, but Drupal comes without any guarantee of support.
All support comes from other end users - beginners and experts alike.
However, quite often I'll be working on the problem after I post a question, and a good way to 'bump' your post is edit it to add new information gained from your own troubleshooting
...
I do not have a menu link called "blog" anywhere. I'm just a single user trying to create a single user (mine) blog using Drupal... I know there's no support guarantee, just trying to make the best of what I can as a new user. I didn't see a bump feature in the comments. Do I have to activate this somehow?
I don't know why it's so hard.. I'm just looking for the easy features that most blogging software has like tags, and recent posts, and blogroll/archive, etc. I'm not trying to do anything technical......
Guess I will try the blog module, but as I mentioned, the beginner's handbook recommended not to do this as a single user system.
Thanks for the help so far!
...
Haven't read this thread carefully, but I answered a question like this on LinkedIn recently. It may be relevant - or it may not.
I have on my to-do list to write a more up-to-date page on creating a blog. The existing materials are not that great for a need that is so common.
Here is the text from that pasted below:
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Creating a single-user blog (or shared blog) in Drupal is a bit more complicated than it might ought to be - certainly on another plane from doing one in Wordpress. But the basic idea is to disable the 'blog' module in core. Then create a new content type called 'blog'. Then create a new template called node-blog.tpl.php and add a new class so you can style blog differently than other pages. That handles the individual posts.
Then to create a blog front page, you need to enable Views module and then configure that so it shows teasers of your most recent posts. Views is complex module, but there is info on drupal.org to assist.
To get the categories, you can use Taxonomy module and tag all your posts. Again, you may need to use Views to generate a sidebar block that looks like what Wordpress does out of the box.
I'd suggest search drupal.org for 'single user blog' or something like that. I did this not too long ago and recall that I had to piece together info from several places to make it work.
But I'd say in closing that if you are simply looking to create a blog, I'd go straight to Wordpress and leave Drupal out of it. However, if you are using Drupal for other stuff, then it's worth working thru it so it fits seamlessly into your existing or planned site.
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Here is a link to the actual content. You may need to be logged in to see it - not sure.
http://www.linkedin.com/answers/technology/blogging/TCH_BLG/556851-26685...
> The link is:
> The link is: http://drupal.org/node/41373
It clearly says: Drupal 4.7.x · Drupal 5.x at the top.
What version of Drupal are you using?
If you are just starting with Drupal, there is no point now in using D5.
Use the latest version (6.14) and realise that docs for earlier versions may be quite inaccurate.
> I do not have a menu link called "blog" anywhere
That menu-item appears when you install the blog module.
Obviously I didn't know you were trying to set up your site without using it.
The only reason these people are suggesting not to install the blog module is that might save a small amount of resources (php memory), and they are correct that you can do almost exactly the same thing using one of the other content-types (Eg. the 'Story' content-type is almost set-up to act like the blog by default).
HOWEVER the blog module produces a special teaser-list that will display *only* blog posts. If you use one of the other content-types you lose this special page; you have to use the 'promote to frontpage' setting, which produces a teaser-list that has *all* the different content-types listed that have been 'promoted'.
That in a nutshell is the difference at the level that you can understand at the moment. There are a load more complications (Eg. the Views module can provide very powerful teaser-lists of whatever you want, whilst the blog module also provides an API so you can blog to your drupal site using other software and servrices). There is no right or wrong way to do things, but you can't make rational decisions about how to build your first site until after you know much more about drupal.
> I don't know why it's so hard.. I'm just looking for the easy features that most blogging software has
The tasks that are easy in Wordpress are initially difficult in Drupal, but at a professional php developer level, tasks that are nearly impossible in wordpress and joomla are fairly easy and do-able in drupal (I'm led to believe). Wordpress is a one-trick pony that can be set-up in a weekend and will not develop much past the initial set-up. You drupal site can develop much more extensively, but at the cost of a lot of time and hard work.
.
Drupal isn't blogging software. It's a content management framework that can be made into a blog. As the others have said, if all you want is a blog, using Wordpress will be easier. As a new user, I wouldn't use Drupal for a blog unless I intended to expand it beyond a blog.
The reason you'll see advice against using the blog module is that it's inflexible and puts a link to "[author]'s blog" on every blog post that takes coding to get rid of. On a single user blog, that's redundant. If you don't mind that link and want something quick and easy, you can always start with the blog module and change over to using views at some point when you're ready. Keep in mind, though, that the blog module itself is fairly sparse and doesn't give you the full blog experience you'd get from Wordpress. Drupal just doesn't have anything like that built in. It can all be built, but you need to put the Legos together. :)
Michelle