The most common trap people fall into when first starting out is that they assume that the basics are easy to master, and therefore don't require too much thought. Things are not quite so clean cut in reality because while your site's basic setup is, more often than not, easy to implement, the more subtle problem is knowing what you want to implement, and how you want to implement it in the first place. Discovering what you need from your site is particularly important for precisely this reason, which is why we discussed it right at the start in Chapter 1.
Does this mean that you should not start working directly on the site unless you know exactly what you want? Not really; like most things, it's a bit of a tradeoff when it comes to starting out with the development of your Drupal website. This is because it is almost impossible to determine exactly what your site will need, and how its functionality should be provided until you have been working with it for some time. Often, you will find yourself modifying the behavior of a site based on feedback from the users.
At any rate, to get the ball rolling, we are going to need to talk about the following Drupal site configuration topics:
- General settings
- Error handling
- Cache and file system settings
- RSS feed settings
- Date settings
- Site maintenance
- String handling
Assuming you have paid close attention to how you want your site to function, and how you visualize it being used, then once your basic settings are complete you should find that the number of changes you have to make down the line are kept to a minimum. Bear in mind though, that changes in Drupal are fairly easy to implement. Don't worry if you have to go back, and change things based on user feedback, or changes to your site in general.
It is sensible to make note of one or two important things before getting our hands dirty. For example, you should make it second nature to check how the changes made to the settings in Drupal affect the site. Learning which setting does what and how it alters the behavior of the site is really the goal of this chapter, and while we won't cover each and every little thing in excruciating detail, you will be shown enough to feel confident about your site's general configuration.
The settings we deal with in this chapter really only affect the site in the broadest sense in that they modify its default behavior—things like what error pages are displayed, or what return email address your site will use. The trickier or more specific settings that apply to a focused area of concern, such as input formats, access rights, or module activation, will be discussed in more detail in the chapters to come.
Having said that, some of the topics we cover here won't apply to you right at this moment. For example, it is unlikely that you will want to work with RSS feeds right off the bat (although you may well want to work with them a little later on). Feel free to skip any sections that are not of immediate value to you, because you can always come back to them when you need to.
Also, some of you might be groaning at the prospect of having to plow through setting after setting in order to get everything just as you want it. Of course, creating a flashy new theme would probably be more exciting, but taking the time to look through and play with all the available settings is an important step towards becoming a competent Drupal administrator. Not only will you learn how to get things done, but also what things can in fact be done. Believe me, with software as flexible and powerful as Drupal, there is a surprising amount on offer.
So what are we going to be looking at precisely? If you log in as the administrator, and navigate to administer, and then settings, you should see something like the following page brought up:
As you can see there are plenty of options to deal with (from the sheer number of links presented on this page), and we will start, throughout this chapter, by working our way down the links provided on the right-hand side of the page. Throughout the course of the book, we will end up covering each and every item under the administer main-menu link.
Some of you may have realized that cron jobs were not mentioned in the introduction as something that is covered in this chapter despite the fact that they are present in the settings page, as shown in the screenshot above. The reason for this is that dealing with cron jobs or scheduled tasks is more of a site administration task instead of a specifically Drupal-oriented one. Because of this, everything you need to know about cron jobs is covered in Chapter 10 on Running Your Website instead.
Now, it won't always be possible to discuss each setting in order because often Drupal requires us to make settings in several different places in order to effect certain changes. However, this will all seem far less daunting once we have gone through the entire menu, and you are more familiar with how things work.