Drupal For Dummies

Drupal for dummies

Level 1

Basic Drupal website
I’ll show you what these things can do:
Blog
Pages
Menu
Blocks
An a little trick: hide admin menu and login
withnode, user and taxonomy= basic Drupal lingo

Basic naked Drupal website
(warning: it’s ugly)

Same site, dressed up
(templatemonster.com: 52$)

Let’s look at some elements
(some of these have to be entered during installation. Don’t worry, we can change it later on)

Site logo
Site slogan
Site mission (only on 1st page)
Primary menu

This is a list oflatest blog items
(I cheated andcalled it «projecthistory»)
This is a «page» in Drupal terminology
(I linked it to the second menu item)

I linked a menu item to the «blog»
It links to a page that automaticallyhold short versions of the latest posts
Hey, something that wasn’t on the otherpage? That’s right, I configured this blockto not show on the front page(we’ll get to what a block is in a minute)

This is a blog post. Drupal shows this page when we click the title of the post
I cheated. These recurring elements of myprojects are manually formatted with HTMLwhen entering the content in Drupal
In «level 2» we’ll see how to do this better.

Now see how this was build
(installation not covered, Google=your friend)

Drupal has 3 default menus. Navigation is what you see on the left
Primary is what we have used here for our website menu
If you need a secondary menu, that’s what the 3rd one is for
You can rearrange stuff in Drupal by drag & drop using this cross
This is the adminsection. Only you
should see this
(kodel=my admin user name)
Everything in Drupal needs to be confirmed with a save button at the very bottom
Remember this, or you *will* cry

Here we tell Drupal where the menu link
should go to.Every piece of content(except blocks) is a node in Drupal.
If you want to link to
a blogpost
a page
a survey
a forum
custom content (see «level 3»)
you need to look up the node number inthe admin section under «manage content»
The «node» is an important concept. You’ll understand it better when we define our own node types in «level 2»)

This menu link does not point to a node. It points to a built in page called «blog»
The “1” means it is the blog of the first user (by definition, our admin super-user)
We can also create pages that are not nodes ourselves (be patient, wait for «level 2» )

Navigation menu
Houston, we got a problem!
Website is finished, but now my users see these ugly things on the left
User login

Remove the user login bysetting it’s position to «none» in the blocks section of the site construction admin menu

Remove the navigation block by going in the settings of the block and removing the tick from the box for anonymous user
In Drupal, the user that is not logged in = anonymous

Hat tip:
If you can’t login anymore after hiding the login box, browse to
http://yoursite/user
If you’re looking for the admin menuafter hiding that as well, try http://yoursite/admin

Modules used: almost none
Actually no modules are needed for this site, just FYI so you can google them

Level 2

Play the module game
This time, we’ll use some modules
CK editor -> text formatting
Views CCK -> a whole new world
Imagecache -> pictures with an edge
+ learn about users and taxonomy
Trick: hide admin menu and login

First, the easy part: users
(you can turn Drupal into Facebook, but we’ll not go that far)

Users can now log in to this site
BTW, here you see the secondary menu in action

Users are posting comments tothe site (on articles, news, pics,items in the shop, announcements)

Users also interact in the built in forum of Drupal(sorry, forgot the screenshot)
About the forum:it works strange – like an engineer thinks
You need to fiddle with the settings to have a flat thread view. And you need a module to disable comments-on-comments.
It’s ain’t pretty, but you can make it better

Some heavy lifting cck+views
(you’ll not get this from this presentation alone. But you’ll understand the concept.)

You can find modules that implement photo albums out of the box.
But please, take the effort to learn how to create one yourself with views & cck.
It’s much more flexible (you’ll need this) and you’ll learn how views & cck are working.
An album is a termin a taxonomy
This is the taxonomy term description
This is the picture that has the taxonomy term and has the flag «use as album cover» set

This is a custom block that uses our own defined node type «photo». We use CCK to define this own type.
The block displays the last 10 photos that are not used in the shop, unless the flag «use on front page anyway» is set.
Read the above again. Queries like this are generated by creating a view in the views module.

See these nice frames around the pictures? And did you notice pics are cut out square? And they have a little vignetting in the corners?
That’s all done with the nifty Imagecache module.
The composite image is generated automatically, no Photoshopping or CSS overlay involved!
(this is just so cool, can’t shut up about it)

Clicking an image in my self-created album pops up this overlay. It’s the Lightbox 2 module showing it’s glory here (it’s fully customizable)

After delivering the website, customer asked if she could showcase the inventory of her store without going to a full blown web shop solution.
I just created a new taxonomy, a new imagecache preset (no fancy frames here) and switched the output of the views module from grid to table, and voila!
This is a good illustration of the flexibility you get when using cck & views

A glimpse at the admin side
(module installation and setting of permissions for users not covered)

This is our own-created CCK node type
Don’t forget this tab. Here you define which imagecache preset is used to display the fields of your content type
These are our custom CCK fields. Note that the «file» field type also needs to be installed as a module

These are all views that I defined, you can browse to their URLThink of views as dynamic pages (potentially using custom content)
Although views can also generate a block as output
instead of a page

This is the editing GUI of a view. No comment. It’s rubbish.
Take arguments from the URL
(=sql where)
Choose your node type (=sql from)
Control the HTML output / paging
Define what you want to output here (= sql select)

Luckily, taxonomy is a lot simpler. My belly dancer adds new categories (sorry, in drupalish: terms) herself
taxonomy name
term name

Here you see that when she uploads content (a picture or a whole folder of pictures) she needs to choose a term
The nifty thing about Drupal is that all your content creation / editing / administration / publication flow works out of the box, also for content types you create yourself. On top of that, you can customize the content entry forms.

Modules used: a few

Level 3

I did it my way
Define all of your own content types
Don’t use standard content types
Dont’t use standard node pages
Don’t use blocks to display content
Define everything in views
Combine views on a page with pages
Find the HTML hooks for your CSS
Create template based on
garland ninesixty fusion

No standard content in sight
(requires good thinking before acting, also called “information architecture”)

Dynamic rotation of content type «quote»
3 fields of content type «curiculum»
3 fields of content type «activity»

List of nodes of content type «project» with category of current activity (1)
4 fields of content type «activity»

A view showing
4 fields of content type «project», linked out of previous list (this view displays project 4)
A 2nd view on the same page showinglist of pics with link to this node (not taxonomy based)

4 fields of content type «curiculum»

We only use custom content types
Forgot to delete the default Drupal content types

You see that the form to create/edit content is also split up in the different field types.
Each field contains descriptive text for the user/admin (customer) entering the content

If you’re not into CSS, use a pre-formed layout (you can also add blocks to the layout instead of views)
Use this if you hand-craft your CSS
The panels module allows you to output more than 1 view on the same page

Modules used: quite a lot

Bonus Level

Good base templates: garland, ninesixty or fusion
Every view generates it’s own classes and ID’s that you can use in CSS
problem: output code is bloated with classes.solution: create own classes / template engine
Always add your custom css to a custom file. Check the template engine of the base template you use to find out where to put it.

Summary
Basic Drupal is easy. Make sure you understand
node, user, taxonomy
default content (blog, page, …) and blocks
download a template and play with the customization
A bit more advanced
learn how custom content types work with CCK
learn how to display them with views (and link to them)
use taxonomy to knit things together
play with imagecache, just for the fun of it
Loose the newbie hat
make a site without default content types or node display pages
style it completely with a custom CSS

Thankyou!
This presentation in380 pages. Nice if youdon’t want to trial anderror as much as I did.
CSS for newbies. Still gotto spend a lot of time with this book before I speak fluently CSS.
Love the series, neverread this book. Hope they don’t mind me using the trademarkin this presentation.

http://www.slideshare.net	34
http://192.168.0.117:8090	15
http://www.barcampantwerpen.org	3
http://www.lmodules.com	2
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com	1
http://projectmanagersite.com	1

Drupal For Dummies

by Koen Delvaux on Mar 05, 2010

Accessibility

Categories

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

6 Embeds 56

Statistics

Drupal For Dummies — Presentation Transcript