I read on Drupal.org that if I wasn't at Drupal 5.5 I should upgrade, as it fixed a "critical problem". DrupNewb was at Drupal 5.3. (Gasp!!!) I'm not sure that this critical problem would really have affected DrupNewb.com, but I certainly wanted to try out a Drupal upgrade.

I'll give a brief recount of some of what I did, but please follow the official Drupal 5.5 UPGRADE.txt instructions if you are doing this upgrade, as I am not covering all of what you need to do.

I have a few blog entries on similar subjects, such as images. Anyone reading one of my blog entries on images would never know there were more, and even if they did it would be difficult to locate the others.

This is what Drupal categories seem to be all about - a flexible taxonomy to tie together different nodes on the same topic.

To learn Drupal I've been going through the Drupal.org website and reading "Pro Drupal Development" by VanDyk and Westgate. PDD suggested that if you are a Drupal Developer you should install the Devel module.

The Devel Module is found at http://drupal.org/project/devel, and I downloaded 5.x-1.x-dev. There was also a release for Drupal 6, but I'm still on 5. I unzipped this directory, and uploaded it to my website in sites/all/modules/devel. Then in 'Home >> Administer >> Site building >> Modules' I enabled all 4 options - Devel, Generator, Devel Node Access, and Macro.

As Drupal is designed to be a fantastic platform for community based websites it stands to reason that one of the first things a Drupal developer will need to develop is a form. Here then is a very simple Hello World with a form. This just asks the user to select from one of 3 greetings with a radio button, and echos the greeting back to them. No fancy DB calls, just a little form with a teensy bit of processing.

I went into Home >> User Account -> Edit, and noticed that I could Upload a picture of myself. The only difficulty was "Maximum dimensions are 85x85 and the maximum size is 200 kB."

So, I went into Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0. I opened the photo I wanted to use. As the photo had to be pretty small to upload I started by using the crop tool to select a smaller area of the photo. Once I selected an area I used edit>>cut, and then file>>new from clipboard. With that new image I went into file>>save for web, set the height to 85 and the file type to png-24 and saved.

Here's another easy one. I was taking a peek at Menu Admin (Home » Administer » Site building » Menus --> List), and I saw that Search was marked as "(disabled)". Search seems like a pretty handy thing to have turned on, so I just clicked "enable". How easy is that!

This one is pretty simple. I was reading about Blocks, and so went to Home » Administer » Site building » Blocks. On that page you have a list of Blocks you are currently showing in a region, and below that a list that you can add to a Region. If you want to add a Block that has a region of <none>, just use the drop down list to select a region to add it to.

To put the "Latest image" in my left side nav I simply went to Home » Administer » Site building » Blocks, found where "Latest image" had an image of <none>, selected "Left sidebar", and pressed "Save blocks".

First I uploaded the image module to allow me to upload images. Then I uploaded the image assist module to allow me to add an image to a blog post.

Now, it is time to add images to galleries. This wasn't too hard, as I already had the modules I needed installed. I just went into
Home » Administer » Content management » Image galleries and added two galeries. I added "Drupal Photos" and then "Cat Photos". I added the cat photos gallery because I wanted to see what using two photo galleries was like and I have so darn many cat photos on my hard drive.

I've been adding Sitemaps for my sites for the past 2 years or so. In all that time I'm at all not certain they have helped in the least. However, the major search engines seem to encourage you to have one, so I'll go along with it. It is so easy to add a XML sitemap for Drupal that there is really no downside.

It is important for good SEO to have page titles and descriptions. Page titles are generated by default with Drupal, but you need to install the Nodewords module to enable descriptions.

Download the Nodewords module from http://drupal.org/project/nodewords/. As usual, I got a big tar.gz file, which for me was nodewords-5.x-1.5.tar.gz. I uncompressed that into a "nodewords" folder on my harddrive with WinZip. I uploaded that whole folder to my Drupal server under the sites/all/modules directory. Next go into Administer >> Site Building >> Modules and enable Meta tags.