Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Today's Novice Drupal Question

I'm now at the point where I have a really simple web site: maybe 10 pages total, in a hierarchy. All but one page is static content; the one page that isn't static is used for displaying this blog.

Most of the web content is text, with a few links and some images. I need to fix my web pages so that they correctly refer to the images (if I view one of my pages, I just see "broken image" icons showing that the link is no good). That's where my question comes in. I want to know: how does Drupal store my content?

This web page seems to indicate that the content is all stored in the database (MySQL in my case).

Okay, fine. So now I need to transfer my image files onto my web server so that my Drupal pages (nodes) can see them. Does that mean I need to somehow put each image into Drupal so Drupal can assign a node ID to them, keep them in the database? That seems a little goofy; the images are already sitting on my web server in my htdocs directory. Can't I just have my web pages refer to those images?

I'm trying to do this the Drupal way, but I don't know what the Drupal way is for dealing with images.

I'll keep looking for answers.

Oh, and by the way: in the Drupal 6 "Getting Started" documentation, I can't find anything about how to take my test web site and push it to my actual web server. Somebody told me about using "mysqldump", but I don't know if that will cover everything in my web site, or what. And I've never used it before; I need to find documentation on drupal.org on how to use it to push my site live.

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