Module Installation

Disclaimers

As far as getting Drupal initially installed and setup, I am going to leave that to other resources (such as http://www.drupal.org.)  It isn't too hard, and there are already quite a few sites that go into this in better detail than I could.  I will also assume that by now you know how to install and activate modules.  If not, check the documentation at http://www.drupal.org.

Also, if following this tutorial completely screws up your website, computer, job, or life, don't blame me.  I recommend doing anything like this first on a local test site.  You might want to start with a fresh install, just so you don't have anything else that could possibly cause conflicts, or you may setup a local version of your live site.  This has the advantage that when you are satisfied with the mod, you can upload it to the server, and be set to go.

I am writing this tutorial using Drupal 6.6, but the process should be similar for other versions.

Gathering the Modules

Activate the following core modules in Drupal under Administer->Site Building->Modules:

  • Aggregator (not required, but useful if you want to provide feeds)
  • Path (not required, but if you want to create a link to a document, it's nice to have)
  • Search
  • Taxonomy
  • Upload

You might also want to enable the following, depending on your needs:

  • PHP Filter
  • Ping

With the core modules set, we need to go get some from http://www.drupal.org.  By the way, I usually like to install the Nice Menus module right away, even if I don't want it available to the public.  It just makes administering the site much easier to have the pop-up menu.  Anyway, download and install the following modules:

  • Content Construction Kit (CCK)
  • FileField (CCK)
  • Getid3 (if you want to use the ability to get ID3 information from files.  My server isn't equipped for this, so I just leave it disabled.
  • ImageField (CCK) (optional)
  • ImageAPI (required for ImageField)
  • Download_count (not to be confused with Download Counter, which, as of this writing, is not available for Drupal 6.x) (optional)
  • Taxonomy List (need for file categorization)
  • Taxonomy Image (optional, but needed if you want an image associated with each category)
  • Taxonomy Menu (optional, but useful)
  • Image (optional, but if using the Taxonomy Image, and you want to attach to an existing image node, you'll need the image_attach module.)
  • Views
  • Advanced Help (optional, but lets some modules provide more detailed help messages)