Create a blog with Drupal step by step

In today's digital age, having a blog is a great way to share your ideas, experiences or knowledge with the world. Drupal, one of the most powerful and versatile content management systems, offers a robust platform for creating and managing a blog. In this step-by-step guide, I will show you how you can create your own blog from scratch using Drupal 10.

Hosting

The first step is to find the infrastructure that will keep Drupal available to everyone. This includes a machine that has a web server, database, and PHP support.

We can choose to set up our own server or look for a hosting plan that suits our needs. From Drupal Sapiens we recommend Lucas Host, for 3 points to highlight:

• It has very competitive prices for what it offers, starting with a plan of approximately €60 per year.
• It offers tools very focused on Drupal , such as automatic one-click installation (with composer and drush). In addition, it has the typical tools that any decent hosting offers: cPanel, backups, email application, graphical file interface...
• Exceptional support . Any questions you have, the 24/7 support answers them almost instantly.

You can see all available Lucus Host plans here.

Domain

You will need a domain to expose your blog on the internet. You can get a domain on many sites on the web and at different prices depending on whether it is ".com", ".org", ".net", etc... 

Normally the same hosting service already offers the contracting of domains , in this way you avoid having to configure the Zones and DNS of the external domain that you have contracted.

If you have chosen Lucus Host as your hosting, check if there are promotions, since sometimes they give away a free year of a domain; Consult its conditions for more information.

You can also find free domains online, although these do not usually offer guarantees of availability, security and/or SSL certificates.

Drupal installation

Once we have our infrastructure ready, it's time to install Drupal!

If you are going to set up your own infrastructure, see here a guide on how to install Drupal from scratch using Docker4Drupal and ignore the next point.

Drupal installation (from Hosting)

If you already have your hosting, review the options they offer you to carry out the Drupal installation. If you have chosen Lucus Host as hosting, from the client area you can access the "Application Installer". Inside, you must look in the "Portals/CMS" group and select Drupal. This powerful tool allows you to install the version of Drupal you want and saves you much of the installation configuration, such as creating the database and its users and privileges.

Once installed, access your website through the previously contracted domain. Your Drupal website should appear here!

Access https://yourdomain.com/user to log in with your administrator user, which will be indicated from the Drupal installation application provided by Lucus Host.

It is recommended that until the website is ready you prohibit other users from accessing it for security reasons. You can easily do this from cPanel in the Files > Privacy section of the directory, clicking on the "Edit" button in the public_html folder and following the instructions that cPanel indicates.

Module installation

You have a nice Drupal, but you need to add useful functionalities. To start with a blog I recommend the following modules:

• Admin toolbar: improves access to administration menus.
• Pathauto and Token: allow you to create friendly and automatic URL patterns.
• Honeypot: allows you to add a layer of protection to forms to prevent spam (useful if your blog allows user registration or comments)
• Linkit: provides a simple and useful interface for adding internal and external links from CKeditor.
• AddToAny: provides buttons to share content on the vast majority of social networks and forums.
• Advanced Link Editor: powers up Linkit and allows you to add attributes like classes, id or that a link opens on a new page for the links from CKeditor.
• Metatags: essential to comply with the SEO of your blog.
• Media, Media library: to reuse multimedia content between contents.

There are many more contributed modules that are super useful, but they depend on the usability you want to give to your blog. For example, if you want your blog to be globally recognized, you may want to consider enabling multilanguage modules!

Theme and design of your blog

The appearance of a website is something to take into account. You can find free themes from drupal.org and extend them yourself by adding your personal touch. You can also choose to pay a designer through websites like Fiverr to design a theme according to your needs. Another option is to search and purchase a theme license from different Drupal theme marketplaces, such as ThemeForest. 

It all depends on the time and cost you want to invest!

Structure and content management 

At this point you must perform a requirements analysis and adapt the data model to your Drupal. In the case of a blog, the essential thing to start would be something like this:

Then it's a matter of adding content types and fields as needs arise.

It is also necessary to create a page type view, whose path can be /blog and that shows a list of the latest articles ordered by descending publication date.

Promotion and dissemination of the blog

Once you have your blog ready, it's time to promote it through social networks and forums!

At this point, it is important to review the website at the SEO and accessibility level; this will allow you to climb positions in search engines like Google. Don't forget to configure your sitemap and robots.txt!