If you have downloaded and installed Drupal, you can follow these steps to set up a blog on your website using Drupal. Drupal is pretty easy to install, it even has an easy-to-use web installer! Drupal has great CMS functionality and if combined with plenty of freely available add-on modules you can create an advanced website. However, in this post we are covering how you can use it for setting up a blog on your website. We recommend Durpal if you have a long term plan for your website but want to begin with plain blogging, this is the most scalable option you could choose.

Steps to Customizing Drupal for Blog with SE friendly URLs
You will need Pathauto module to auto create cleaner URLs for your blog posts. The Token module is required by the Pathauto module, so you’ll need to get it too. Once you have downloaded the modules go to your drupal folder and in the subfolder names sites, you will further see 2 sub sub folders called All and Default. Inside the All folder, create a new folder and name it Modules, you can unpack the Token and Pathauto into this folder using your archiver. Now Upload the contents of the entire “sites” folder to your website. After you have uploaded the files, you will now need to log into your Drupal account as administrator and then go to the Administer, Find Modules in the Site building section.

On the Modules page, you will see a list of modules that have been enabled and installed for your website. Put a check mark next to the following ones:

  • Blog
  • Path
  • Pathauto
  • Token

Then press on Save configuration button.

By default, your blog posts or any other pages created on Drupal will have URLs that look like www.xyz.com/?q=node/12 which are not too good for search engines and therefore, this post aims to let you install meaningful and readable articles. For enabling urls like www.xyz.com/category/life, you have to go to administer and then go to Site configuration section, click on Clean Urls

If your web server supports the use of this feature. To do that, find the link “Run the Clean URL test” in the paragraph under the radio buttons and click it. If all goes well, you should be returned to the “Clean URLs” page, with the radio buttons now become clickable.

Although you have enabled Clean URLs, and the web addresses of your Drupal administration pages have changed to use more people-friendly URLs still your blog posts and other article pages will not automatically be assigned friendly URLs. To configure Drupal to do this, you will need to set the defaults for the Pathauto module. Pathauto offers plenty of advanced features that you can use to alter the way your clean urls get formed.

In the Site Information section, you can specify you blog name, slogan, contact information etc. You can also alter the default front page of your website from here. In the section Site building you can use different themes and manage different looks for your web blog. This section also provide plenty of variables to make advanced changes and settings for menus, site blocks etc.