So I read the manual install instructions for Ubercart, and it's pretty extensive. Among other things, you have to install a bunch of modules before you install Ubercart. This kind of makes sense, if you are writing a really robust system for Drupal you are bound to use some of the great stuff already available for Drupal.

Having worked in the past with a few shopping carts, and even written part of one myself (www.fluffycat.com/Java-Cart/), I thought I'd give one of the Drupal carts a go. So, I've decided to install Ubercart. I don't think I have any actual products to sell on DrupNewb, so maybe I'll just sell digital media like cat photos (if you can sell digital media with Ubercart) or something small like beach pebbles or pennies. I don't really want to sell any of these goods, but to thoroughly test Ubercart out want to set up the cart as if I intend to sell something.

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.

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.

When learning a new language or system I always like to write a simple "Hello World" program. Therefore, to learn about Drupal Modules I have written "hello_drupnewb".

In my last post I talked about adding the Image module. I added the Image module because I wanted to add a photo to a blog post. While adding Image allowed me to upload images to the DrupNewb site, it did not allow me to add them to my blog posts. I looked out on the Drupal.org forums, and found this post (http://drupal.org/node/193156) which said that I need the Image Assist module and why. Essentially, using the Image module allows me to upload images as "Nodes" on their own. Image Assist makes it possible to add images as supporting content for other Nodes. Makes sense.

I've been away from Drupal and Drupnewb for about a week as we moved from an apartment here in San Diego to a house. I hope my legions of fans haven't been too disappointed...

Anyway, last Tuesday, November 20th I attended the local San Diego Drupal Group meeting (groups.drupal.org/node%252F4038) held at the Cream Coffee Bar (www.newtosandiego.com/Cream-Coffee-Bar/). It was great to meet some other local Drupers, and Harry Slaughter (www.devbee.com) did a very nice presentation on what to expect from Drupal 6.