Installing Drupal Modules

This is the third in a series of occasional tutorials about Drupal.

All references to Drupal in this article refer to Drupal 6. I’ve been working with Drupal 7 recently and I should be doing some D7 tutorials quite soon.

Installing a new module is possibly the easiest thing you will ever need to do in Drupal. In this tutorial I am going to install the Content Construction Kit (CCK) module along with 3 other CCK modules that can be used to add different types of content onto a web page. These extra modules are FileField, ImageField and Link which means we will install 4 modules in all.

These modules allow site admins to create content types which site users can then use to create different types of content. They are used so often in Drupal 6 these days that all but the Link Module have been incorporated into Drupal 7 core and come with the default installation.

The Urls for these modules are here:

http://drupal.org/project/cck
http://drupal.org/project/filefield
http://drupal.org/project/imagefield
http://drupal.org/project/link

At the bottom of each of these pages is a number of links to download the required items. You can download a tarball (.tar.gz) or a zipped (.zip) file. Being a Linux user I usually opt for the tarball. Once you have downloaded these you should move them into the directory sites/all/modules and unzip them. If you have a new Drupal installation and this directory doesn’t yet exist you will need to create it. To unzip the tarball in Linux use the command tar -xzvh tarball.tar.gz. I usually delete the tarball after I have unzipped it. You should now have 4 directories within your modules directory.

The final step to allow you to start using these modules is to enable them. To do this you will need to log in as the administrator and navigate to Administer – Site Building – Modules. Here you should see a screen similar to the one below:

Drupal Module Screen

Select all the check boxesin the CCK section, scroll down to the bottom of the page and hit the ‘Save Configuration’ button. You should now see a message telling you your configuration changes have been saved. That means your job is done. Your modules are now installed and you can start to use them to create new content types which your users can use to create new content.