Make Drupal act like a Content Management System

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Before you say, “Drupal is a content management system!”, let me agree with you. It certainly does manage content, in roughly the same way that my “to do”/”to file” piles manage my paperwork. However, it lacks many features that I would consider critical for a CMS for a non-trivial website. Most fundamentally, it has no sense of hierarchy. Documents you create are just node/number. Files you upload all go in one directory (probably “files”). Any hierarchy in your navigation menus or URL aliases (which you will have to create manually!) exists only in your mind, not in Drupal. (To be fair, if you go to a document which has a menu item, it does highlight that as the “active” menu item.)

Out of the box, Drupal does come with support for categorization of documents, feed aggregation, and syndication. The default front page is a list of the most recently posted items. And, the two content types you can create are “Pages” and “Stories”. By now, this is probably starting to sound familiar: at its core, Drupal is a blogging engine…and not much more.

However, if you’re stuck using this product to create a non-blog website, it is possible to make it behave more like a fully-featured CMS through use of a few non-core modules. Specifically:

  1. Download and install these two modules.
  2. From Site Building→Modules, turn on “Category Menu”, “Category Pathauto”, and all dependencies
  3. From Site Building→Modules, turn off “Taxonomy” (Category replaces it)
  4. Under Site Configuration→Pathauto→Node Path Settings, set the Container and Category paths to “[categorypath]”
  5. If you haven’t already, under Site Configuration→Clean URLs, enable Clean URLs.

Now, create your content as type “Container”. (“Category” will also work, if you have already categorized pages that you’d like to show up as parts of the category page.) Two caveats:

  • When you’re setting the menu options for these items, do it under “Container information”, not menu settings. The latter will be overridden by the former.
  • This doesn’t solve the problem of a lack of hierarchy for uploaded files. Maybe there is a way to solve this; I haven’t really looked.

One other tip: the default input formats on a Drupal site leave something to be desired. If you want to be able to put in raw HTML, do this:

  1. Go to Site Configuration→Input Formats→Add Input Format
  2. Create a new format called Raw HTML with no filters selected
  3. Optionally, make it the default.

1 thought on “Make Drupal act like a Content Management System”

  1. Another fun realization: Drupal has no ability to restrict access to content, beyond an all-or-nothing, “you can see the site or you can’t” permission. The one module that I’ve found that looks like it should make this more granular and has a stable version requires patching out of the box to make it not crash.

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