I received a few emails from drupal.org suggesting that there were security flaws with the Drupal core for versions before 5.6, and that if I wasn't up to 5.6 I should upgrade. So, I followed my own instructions from the last time I upgraded (http://www.drupnewb.com/node/26), and things went fine. I must admit, that the first time I upgraded Drupal it seemed difficult. This time it didn't seem difficult at all.

Unless, of course, my site has some big problem I haven't noticed yet.

Not sure what benefits this upgrade has besides patching the security flaw.

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.

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!

The one thing that didn't go smoothly in my install of Drupnewb.com on Lunarpages was the cron job. I've run cron manually a few times for DrupNewb, but now it's time to try and get this running correctly.

It seems that all you need to do is run the php program cron.php which is right in the root of Drupal. As I have previously set up cron jobs to optimize the MySQL tables for the custom CMS systems I have written, it wasn't too hard for me to get cron.php running for Drupal.

In my last post I really needed to have a few html <h3> tags to break things up. However, it seems that <h3> tags, as well as most other html tags, are turned off by default. So, I needed to go into the admin panel and allow a few more tags than are the default.

On the Administer » Site configuration » Input formats --> View page I had "HTML Filters", "Inline images", "Line break converter", and "URL filters" checked. I had "PHP evaluator" unchecked.

To get Drupal set up the way I wanted for DrupNewb I did need to change a few settings.

admin->site configuration->clean URLS
I enabled clean urls

admin->site configuration->site information
I set the Name to "DrupNewb"
I set the Slogan, Mission Statement, and Footer messages.
I set anonymous user to "Visitor"

admin->site building->themes
I set the default theme to bluemarine
In bluemarine->configure I set it to display logo, site name, and site slogan.
I also set up a new site logo, which I talk about in my last blog.

admin->site building->modules

One of the first things I wanted for my newbie site was a newbie logo. I used Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 to create my logo, using the shape tool to create the iconic kitten logo. I got a ton of shapes from the Adobe Exchange for Custom Shapes (www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/). I originally wanted to use a baby for the logo, but I couldn't find a baby shape and I could find a kitten. So, A kitten it was.

Welcome to www.DrupNewb.com, a site where I learn about building a Drupal site and tell all.

I started out by downloading the latest stable version of Drupal, which was 5.3, from www.Drupal.org to my laptop. Drupal comes in one big compressed file, which was named "drupal-5.3.tar.zip" when I downloaded it.

I used Winzip to uncompress the zip file into all the directories and files I would need to install Drupal. I uploaded the uncompressed files under the drupal-5.3 to the root directory for www.DrupNewb.com on my Lunarpages server.