Drupal For Dummies®

Chapter 10. Advanced Administration

In This Chapter

• Getting new themes and modules

• Maintaining Drupal

• Monitoring your site

• Setting up a cron

Up to this point, if you've read the chapters in sequence, you have only touched the surface of administering your Drupal site. To make sure everything runs smoothly, you need to keep your software up to date. The Drupal community frequently comes out with updates. In this chapter, I show you how to keep your site protected by upgrading when necessary. Also, there are many administrative features you have not seen yet that extend your control over your site. You can monitor what visitors do when they come to your site, which can help you fine-tune your content.

Consider this chapter the next level in understanding how Drupal works.

Adding New Themes and Modules

Chapter 7 discusses how to change the default Drupal theme to a different one, also preinstalled. Chapter 9 shows how to add a blog and forum using modules that are also preinstalled.

One of the best things about Drupal is that developers are constantly contributing new themes and new modules. You can extend Drupal's functionality in incredible ways by adding new modules. You can create an incredibly professional-looking site in minutes by finding the right theme.

Follow these steps to add new contributed modules and themes to your site:

1. Locate a new module or theme you want to use on your site.

2. Download the new module or theme to your local computer.

   It will be a .zip or .tar.gz file.

3. Upload the ...