Having installed Drupal a fair number of times now, I’ve got into a routine of essential things that I run through for each and every project regardless of the details of that topics, things that are generic to any Drupal installation and thought I would share them here. These are the same steps that I go through each and every time, before adding the project specific modules and functionality etc.

1. Enable Clean URLs

Clean URLs removes the horrible “?q=” from the urls generated by Drupal when creating nodes, and makes the nodes easier to remember and more SEO friendly. When used with the path auto module it enables very clear and SEO friendly page paths.

2. Create an Admin Role

By default, Drupal is installed with two user roles, anonymous and authenticated users. This allows permissions to be set for visitors to your site and people who have registered to be a member. When the installation process is complete, you’re logged in as user 1 which is the only user with permissions to perform certain tasks such as running update.php and other admin tasks. It’s much more secure to create an a new role called adminstrator or something similar and grant it permission to do all the tasks that user 1 can do, and only log in as user 1 when running update.php etc. This also gives the opportunity to grant other users access to the administration pages whilst still maintaining control over the site.

3. Essential Modules

Like other CMS’, there are essential modules which are used on 99% of sites, regardless of the type of site. There are certain bits of functionality which are almost like an extension of core as they are used that often. The modules I find myself installing time after time include:

• CCK
• Views
• Admin Menu
• Page Title
• Path Auto
• Devel
• Advanced Help
• Date
• WYSIWYG & Editor

4. Install Themes

Like the Modules, there are themes which I install in every fresh Drupal project which are the RootCandy theme and Framework. RootCandy I use as my adminstration theme and for entering content on sites as it provides an excellent UI for this task and much better than the default Garland theme. As a designer, I like the Framework theme as a starting point for my custom themes as it strips out a lot of the styles and leaves me with a blank canvas so to speak from which to create themes.

5.Configuration

Once all these modules and themes are installed and enables, I always take the time to configure them all correctly as well as adding any other user roles required such as Editors, Forum admins etc. It’s much easier to set all these up right at the beginning before any content is added especially when configuring modules such as the page title and path auto modules.

With CCK and Views, I always have a plan written down of what content I require and the fields that will be needed as well as all the views which will need to be created before I begin implementing them within Drupal.

Does some of this look familiar? Do you have any other essential steps that you run through before creating a new Drupal project? Let us know in the comments below and we can all learn from each other.