By default, Drupal displays only article teasers on the front page. I don't like having to click through to the articles, and I suspect the people reading my site don't like it either. I could bump up the size of the teasers to compensate, but then searches and category listings would also grow. I really want to leave the teasers as they are, and simply show the full articles on the front page.

You can do this with the Drupal Views module. The process of creating a view is a bit confusing, but it opens up a lot of possibilities for very customized content delivery.

Your New View

Download and install the Drupal Views module, then enable the Views and Views UI modules. If you want to offer an RSS feed (you probably do) also turn on Views RSS.

Navigate to Administer > Site building > Views. Locate the frontpage view, which is located under Default Views. Click the Add button located to the right of that row.

You should now see a form displaying the default front page view settings. Look for the field named View Type located in the Page section. This field controls what gets displayed in the view and defaults to Teaser View. To get the full article text just change this to Full Nodes. You can leave all of the other settings as they are--unless you want to customize your front page further. Be careful though and try it on a test site first!

The final step is to configure your site to use the new front page view. Navigate to Administer > Site configuration > Site information. At the bottom of the page, set Default front page to "frontpage" (the URL of the customized view).

Visit your front page; you should now see the full articles. In addition, there will be a View menu across the top of the page. Only users with the administer views permissions will be able to see this menu (not the regular folks visiting your site).

That's It!

You should now be able to view the full text of your nodes on the front page of your site, while still getting only the teaser in searches and listings. Feel free to leave questions and suggestions in the comments and I will try to answer. I may update this article from time to time as I learn more, or to reflect changes in Drupal.

Update: As you might have noticed, I don't use this technique any longer. As I found myself writing longer articles the front page became difficult to navigate. Instead I am tending toward longer teasers, with short to medium length stories included entirely in the teaser. It is nice to have the flexibility.