All modules and themes are downloaded from their project page. In this example, we will download and install the Views module and the Advanced Help module. To get the source code, we will navigate to the Views project page at http://drupal.org/project/views as shown in the following screenshot, and also the Advanced help project page at http://drupal.org/project/advanced_help.

The Views project page shows only the official releases; other project pages frequently show development snapshots. The Status column, indicated by Item 1 in the preceding screenshot, gives you information about the different versions that are available. In most cases, you should only use official releases that have a status of Recommended. Also, the version of the module needs to match up with the version of Drupal; for example, only the 6.x versions of modules work with Drupal 6.

In this case, we want to install Views for Drupal 6, so we click the Download link, indicated by Item 2 in the preceding screenshot, to download the module.

Then, repeat these steps for the Advanced help module at http://drupal.org/project/advanced_help.

Once you have downloaded the code from drupal.org to your computer, decompress the file. On a Mac or Linux machine, this will occur automatically; on a PC, use 7-zip (an open-source utility available at http://www.7-zip.org) to decompress the tarball into the Views directory.

Open your FTP client, and upload the directory containing the module (in our case, Views) to the sites/all/modules directory as shown in the following screenshot:

Once the modules have been successfully uploaded into your sites/all/modules directory, click the Administer | Site Building | Modules link, or navigate to admin/build/modules as shown in the following screenshot:

This screen gives a breakdown of the modules that you have uploaded into your sites/all/modules folder.

To enable the Advanced help module, select the checkbox next to Advanced help. To enable the Views module, select the checkboxes next to the Views, Views exporter, and Views UI modules. Click the Save configuration button to save your settings and enable your modules. You will receive a confirmation message at the top of the screen.

Once you have enabled a new module, you should check to see if there are any configuration options for the module. To do this, navigate to the main administration page, either by clicking Administer, or by navigating to admin. Then, click the By module tab as shown in the following screenshot:

By looking at the page, we see that both the Views module and the Advanced help module have links to Configure permissions. These permissions are covered in more detail later in this chapter, in the Creating Views section.

After you have uploaded a theme into the sites/all/themes directory, you will need to enable it via the Administer | Site Building | Themes link, or by navigating to admin/build/themes. Themes and their different settings are covered in more detail in Chapter14: Theming and User Interface Design.