Site building

Drupal has no formal definition of site building: neither core nor the User Guide glossary defines the term. The User Guide names it as one of the skills it teaches, next to installing, administering and maintaining the content of a site. Its goals describe the work in two steps: plan the content architecture, then build the site you planned.

What site building covers in Drupal 11

The User Guide teaches these steps through the admin interface. Its chapters show what they include:

• Content structure. Content types, fields, reference fields, taxonomy, forms and display settings, image styles and text formats.
• People. User accounts, roles and permissions.
• Blocks and listings. Placing blocks and building listings with Views.
• Languages, modules and themes. Making the site multilingual, and installing modules and themes from Drupal.org.

In Drupal 11.4.10 the Standard install profile already installs modules for this work, among them Node, Block, Taxonomy, Field UI, Views and Views UI, plus the Configuration Manager module (config). The admin menu groups the screens: Structure, Extend, Configuration and People are separate top-level entries.

Example

To add a case study section, you would work through these steps:

1. Add a Case study content type under Structure › Content types and give it fields for the client, the result and an image.
2. Create a vocabulary for industries and add it to the content type as a reference field.
3. Build a listing of case studies with Views UI and place it as a block.
4. Grant your editors' role the permissions to create and edit that content type.

None of these steps needs custom code. All of them produce configuration that you can export and deploy.

Common mistakes

• Building before planning. The User Guide puts a planning chapter, including Planning your Content Structure, before the chapters that build the site. Decide which content types and fields you need before you create them.
• Careless machine names. The machine name of a saved bundle cannot be changed: ConfigEntityBundleBase throws an exception when it changes. Pick it before the first save.
• Building directly on the live site. The User Guide's deployment example builds on a development site and moves the result to production with configuration synchronization. Both sites need the Configuration Manager module.

For marketing and content teams

A new field, a new category list and a new listing page are all site building tasks. Describe the content and the audience; the person doing the work chooses the content type, fields and view. Agree on names and on who may edit what before the build starts, because the labels you pick appear on the editing screens.

With DXPR

DXPR Builder can place a Drupal block or a view as an element inside a page, so the blocks and listings you site-build can sit in a visually edited layout. See DXPR Builder.

Sources

• Drupal User Guide: Audience and goals
• Drupal User Guide: Setting up content structure
• Drupal User Guide: Extending and customizing your site
• Drupal User Guide: Synchronizing configuration versions
• Drupal User Guide: Concept: Administrative overview
• Drupal.org: Configuration API overview
• Drupal core 11.4.10: Standard install profile
• Drupal core 11.4.10: ConfigEntityBundleBase