I suppose most readers think that I've abandoned not only this series, but this entire blog. Fear not. The fact is that I've been pondering this last topic for quite some time, and still don't have a really good answer for how to create a front page on a Drupal site.

And maybe that's okay for this series. When I started writing this series, my goal was to help someone go from a blank hard drive to an operating system and web site that they could play with. The goal was never to get anything all the way to production on the first go around.

The truth of the matter is, there is no simple solution here. If you set out (as I have done many times in the past) with the goal of creating a web site for the sake of creating a web site, you won't have any idea what you're trying to create when it comes time to build the front page. But that's why you really need to plan your entire web site before you begin creating or installing anything.

Having said that, there are a couple of options that will help you get the look you want for your site, depending on what you need.

The first and simplest option is the default behavior. Simply start creating content, and anything that is checked "Promoted to front page" will begin appearing on the front page. This is great for a news or blog site. But what if you want more?

You can tweak the front page a bit by creating blocks that are only visible on the front page. The Views Module will allow you to create some pretty cool blocks to present your site contents.

Probably the next easiest thing is to use the Front Page module. This will allow you to lay out the contents of your front page in a fairly generic manner. It will also display different front pages to different users, if you so desire. Combine the fact that you can write raw PHP code here with the power of the Views Module, and you might be able to create a very complex page. I haven't tried this, but it's an interesting possibility.

The Panels 2 Module is incredibly powerful, complex and confusing. I love it, but am still trying to learn how to use it effectively. This module lets you do some pretty complex things on any page, not just the front page.

While these tools have their place, it appears that most of the really good sites out there rely on heavily customized theming for the front page. Obviously that is beyond the scope of this series, but check out the PHPTemplate Documentation as a starting point.

So, I guess that wraps up this series. I know it only scratched the surface, but I hope that it covered the basics. I must confess that since my last entry, I've started drifting from Ubuntu over to the Debian distribution of Linux. There are just a couple of things I've been trying to do with servers that Debian makes a little easier than Ubuntu.

I'm not sure what I'll blog about next. I have several sites in the initial stages, and most of them were started without proper planning, so maybe that's what I'll have to talk about. I guess we'll just have to see.