Drupal home page creation techniques

This is a guide based on a post in the Drupal support forum. The current version of this guide is a work-in-progress, and will be tweaked and improved with any advice and tips provided in the comments, and will also have some screenshots added to help guide you through the process.

All of these techniques have been written about elsewhere in depth, however the goal of this guide is to provide a general overview of (as well as draw together into a single place for easy reference) the variety of techniques you can choose to use in making the home/front page for your Drupal site.

This guide:

1. Outlines the basic concepts of each technique.
2. Provides some opinions/thoughts as well as advice on the benefits versus drawbacks of each.
3. Links to more detailed guides and information on the techniques.
4. When needed, provides a full lesson on a technique that is not yet well documented.

If your Drupal site is anything beyond a basic “blog”, then chances are you would like to use a much more complex layout for the home page of your site than the bland list of titles and teasers that you get by default. Perhaps you’d like to have a blocked off area where the titles, teaser text, and thumbnail image of your latest News content shows up… with another area dedicated to a list of several featured discussions currently taking place in your user forum. Perhaps you’d like another spot that shows a slideshow widget containing the latest photos you’ve uploaded to your gallery.

Creating a front page (or other sub-section pages as well) that contains all of the above features and more is not very difficult in Drupal, once you learn about several very powerful tools that you have at your disposal. With Drupal there always tends to be a variety of ways to accomplish the same goal, and developing your front page is no exception; it can be created using a variety of tools and techniques, and your choice will depend on your preferences as well as the needs of the particular site.