Just Skins

Drupal might not be the easiest of CMS to manage but it’s one of the most complete solution if you want a full-fledged site. The choice of CMS must completely depend on the kind of website you want. Drupal and Joomla seems to be the choice of many users who want to create a serious dynamic site. There are however many great.
Drupal has a big community which keeps this CMS sexy by bringing out modules (plug-ins) which enhance the functionality of Drupal on its top. A site like flickr can be made in some time using Drupal with the help of free plugins as said in this post.
Drupal has some other benefits like you can create new content types and create advanced custom views for them without writing any code using Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views Modules. One thing that will certainly make sense to most webmasters is the advanced URL control in Drupal which lets you give custom URL’s to each post. Drupal lets you structure your site’s content, allows multiple users to edit your site and even lets you Manage discussion forums. Further, polls can also be implemented for feedback. These were the basic features of Drupal which in other CMS, say WordPress requires plugins.
One thing however that ails Drupal is that there are hardly any good themes for Drupal and there is not much of awareness about the sites which are based on Drupal. We felt this need and thought to share what we know about this amazing CMS. Following are some of the sites which are based on Drupal. You might wanna check them out.

The Onion:

Vday:

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I have been playing with Drupal since last few weeks and most of my play has been regarding manipulating the theme of Drupal. I have accumulates certain tidbits or some piece of information in my experiements with theming Drupal which I would like to share. Since I have used Drupal more as an user rather than a coder, so you might be interested in what a relatively noob has noticed. Let me tell you that I have had my experiements on Drupal 6 before you start yelling my name in vain.

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Backup and Migrate is a very useful module which backs up and restores your Drupal database or migrating data from one Drupal site to another Drupal site. It’s just wise to use it if you don’t wanna curse yourself when you lose data.

TinyMCE WYSIWYG Editor is a not the kind of WYSIWYG editor you would ever imagine because of the difficulty in installing and configuring this module. It will test your nerves but if you can do it you will emerge with better understanding if Drupal.

Views is one of the most difficult Drupal module to master but it carries great learning curve with it which will help you enhance your Drupal skills.

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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. Read the rest of this entry »

WordPress might be the CMS of choice when all you have to do is just blog but Drupal is the one most look out for when the work is serious. Drupal is the free and open source CMS which is used by many websites which do more than just blogging.

To make matters more interesting, Acquia has launched a commercial support for the Drupal Social Publishing System. Acquia offers packaged collection of some of the best software from the Drupal community members which will give users some resource to start creating Drupal based websites more easily.

Acquia has also launched an Acquia Network which will be providing the support and network services to the companies and users in order to keep their Drupal based websites running troublefree. The users of this network will get access to a suite of remote site management services like Software update management,System profile management, Automated spam blocking with Mollom and Heartbeat uptime monitoring etc.

Acquia will make it easy for the developers to create community-based publishing websites or the ones where the focus is on user generated content. This development will certainly cause a cheer from all those who run their websites on Drupal.

Acquia Drupal is GPL licensed - freely available for download and use.

It is hard to find really cool and high quality free Drupal theme on Drupal.org. The market is not as hot as it is for wordpress, Although drupal is a great CMS and really really popular. Drupal is a great platform to build your website, but it is hard to find real professional themes to do so.

Only few scalable themes for drupal are available for free, Here are some of the best 3 column free Drupal themes that could use, if you use drupal.

BlueBreeze
This is a great looking drupal theme, soothing to the eye is its light blue and grey gradients, its a theme that can be used by anyone, it is pretty generic in concept, doesn’t carry any theme or branding, one of the most popular and scalable drupal theme.

Danger4k
Danger4k is a professional looking theme, it can become a corporate website, a web portal, extremely scalable and amazingly well done, the colors, layout, navigation everything is perfect. The Danger4k theme is derived from the Bluebreeze theme.

The Morning After
This theme is based on the Wordpress theme The Morning After. This Drupal theme is amazing and is also W3C Valid, and tested on Firefox, IE7, Netscape, Opera, Safari> It has a support for two, one, and no columns. Also you can manage logo, primary links, secondary links, mission, search box, shortcut icon and user pictures

ADT Webapplication
This very clean web2.0 theme is a generic theme that can be used for many different websites. The theme is predominantly white with red accents and a green subheader, though using theme options you can easily loose the subheader. This theme is a port of the identically named template by Luka from solucija.com.

Amadou
This is another great looking drupal theme, inspired by some wordpress theme layout. 3 columns are well laid out and this theme is extremely useful if you want to have a blogish look to your website and yet run it on drupal. It is a must have!!

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