As most of you are probably aware, Drupal is the best PHP Open Source Content Management System. Most serious big players in the web industry always prefer Drupal over any other CMS applications, mainly because Drupal is more powerful and reliable. But after trying both Drupal & Joomla, I feel like Drupal is really flexible and reliable. But when it comes to user friendliness, Drupal is way behind Joomla. Drupal is such a good CMS system, but it’s not that easy for a beginner to learn it himself. Drupal documentation is not up to the mark for a beginner. So it requires extensive research and lot of googling to master Drupal yourself.

A few months ago, I started learning Drupal theming – I found myself spending a lot of time searching Google for answers to my basic doubts about Drupal. Being self taught, I thought I will archive these questions that troubled me and took up so much of my time. I hope this post would save some Drupal enthusiast some precious time.

Well, here are the questions – go ahead and read

How do I access the Drupal admin panel, when the login block is disabled?

This is really a common question among Drupal beginners; we need not always want the login block to be displayed in our site. Since most of these cases the login block will be turned off in the administration. In those cases, we can access the login screen simply through the following URL.

1

http://sitename.com/?q=user

or if the clean URL is enabled

1

http://sitename.com/user

Similarly if you can’t access the logout link and need to logout, you can do so by using the URL

1

http://sitename.com/?q=logout

alternatively with clean URLs enabled you can try

1

http://sitename.com/logout

How to make my Drupal site offline to public, while it is under construction?

You can set your Drupal site in off-line mode, while it is being developed. Just click Administer » Site maintenance. There you can set the status to off-line. If you wants, you can also set your own custom off-line message. When set to Off-line, only users with the administer site configuration permission will be able to access your site to perform maintenance; all other visitors will see the site off-line message configured there. Authorized users can log in during Off-line mode directly via the user login page. Read the rest of this entry »

Finally! I am done with my blog design. Now I realized the fact that, the toughest task any web designer can take on is ‘designing his own website’.

I have been thinking about starting a personal blog or portfolio for quite long, may be for the last 3 or 4 years. Finally, I have registered my own domain name 4 months back. Thanks to yahoo-geocities for closing their brilliant free web-hosting service, bcoz its after reading geocite’s closure email alert, I started thinking seriously about registering a domain name and starting a blog ASAP. Bcoz its really painful to realize that I am gonna loose my online personal identity which has been silently helping me from behind throughout my personal and professional careers for more than 8 years till now. And after all it’s Aravind, the highly talented young web 2.0 guy who explained to me the vast capabilities of wordpress as a CMS, and now after trying it out, I understand that wordpress is more than just a blogging tool, simply superb!

For the last four months I have been burning all my late-night energy and bandwidth to make my blog design pleasing to myself. I tried almost all color schemes, all possible layout options, but I never get pleased with the outcome. I keep on changing the design every now and then all these days. All that I wanted was a website which is visually appealing, user-friendly, simple & fast loading. I don’t know why I am going through such a dreaded creative block in this case alone. May be because my approach was too much emotional here.

Anyway, at last I have decided to compromise on some of my design ideas and to make the site live as early as possible, and I hope it will soon get evolved as my dream design.