Now that we have a basic Home page and can add other basic pages to the site, it’s time to add a Blog section to the site, or you can call it a News section if that suits your site better than Blog. For my purposes I will be calling it a blog for the rest of this post.
Blogs are great to have on your site. They keep the site dynamic for visitors, providing them with fresh content. Blogs are also great for Search Engine Optimization for the same reason, especially if you create a section on your home page for your latest posts or your promoted posts.
I have read of several different way to create a blog but I think this solution is the simplest to start with. Some solutions recommended creating a new content type called Blog in addition to Article and Basic Page. But Article is already there, ready to be used and I like to keep things as simple as possible. This solution may cause problems later but we’ll deal with that if it comes to it.
So start of by adding a few Articles, just as you added Basic pages. When you add an Article under “Promotion Options” the tick box “Promoted to front page” should be ticked.
However, once you save it, it doesn’t appear on your Home page. That’s because the Home page is not classed as the Front page. The Front page is actually at www.example.com/node.
To add a link to the main menu called “Blog” that goes to www.example.com we go to Structure > Menus > and edit Main Navigation.
On the edit page you click “+Add Link”. Give it the title “Blog” (or “News”) and in the link box add “/node”. The Parent link should be <Main navigation>. You can also sort out the order it appears in the menu by adding a weight e.g. 20.
Once you save it you will see you have a new navigation link that leads to a page that lists the Articles you have posted.
However, the page doesn’t have a title yet. In order to add a title to this page e.g. “Blog” we need to go to Sttructure > Views and then click to edit Frontpage.
Click on the link under “Title” and change the Title to Blog. Save it, then save the Frontpage view.
Now when you visit the blog page it will have the title “Blog”.
We now have a basic website which is similar as to how I set up WordPress site when I begin to build a site.
Now it’s time to dig a little deeper into Drupal.
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