A simple blog page for Drupal 7

'Don't use the blog module! It turns your whole website into a blogging site!' Or: 'you're nuts if you don't use views' (then install twenty modules and spend the next six months learning how to use them!)

The Web is a great place for advice, isn't it? All I wanted was pretty simple: just a page with news items submitted by various users, a read more link and the capacity to comment on them. I doubted that the designers of Drupal hadn't already cracked this one, but you wouldn't know that from looking at some of the solutions posted on the Web. Though, admittedly, the designers of the blog module could have added a configure button ...

For those of you with similar ambitions, I suggest you at least try half a dozen mouse-clicks first:

1. Enable the blog module. This turns on a blog entry type of content, which is exactly what you want.
2. Go to Admin->Structure->Blog Entry->edit and deselect the 'promote to front page' option. Save.
3. Go to http://<your-host>/?q=blog/ to add your first blog entry. Add this link to your front page and now you have a page of news items.

That's all there is to it. No rocket-science, no phpmyadmin hacking of the database, no fancy modules and courses in how to use Drupal views, no php. Sometimes I wonder why it is that, when people are faced by a problem they have no clue how to solve, that they start a competition to find the most complex answer to the simplest problem.