Introduction To Drupal

Drupal An Introduction

What Should I Know First? Before Installing: Be familiar with databases and PHPMyadmin, have a web server and a local database server After Installing: Server admin skills, a lot of curiosity, and some time to spend learning how modules work together and what’s available

Main Drupal Topics 1: Understanding Drupal Core 2: Installation 3: Conﬁguring Core 4: Conﬁguring Modules 5: Best Practices

1: Understanding Drupal

What Is Drupal? Content Management System (CMS) Framework - Content Management Framework CMF Open Source - Under GPL General Public License Web Application Framework - Written in PHP A way for developers and non-developers alike to manage content. Uses control panels rather than straight code.

Created By Dries Buytaert Developer from Antwerp, Belgium Derived from “Druppel,” the Dutch word for “Drop” which also means village in Dutch.

Drupal Distinctions Best PHP Open Source CMS from Packt Publishing Best Overall 2008 Open Source CMS Award for Second Year in a Row It does everything Wordpress does, and a lot more Its code is cleaner and better supported than Joomla!’s Is one of hundreds of CMS, but is continually growing.

Drupal Community Now a large community of developers and designers all work on Drupal and talk to each other irc.freenode.net - #drupal, #drupal-support #drupaltheming Conferences - DrupalCon Unconferences - DrupalCamps Meetups, etc... I organize the Drupal Meetup Group here in Austin.

Drupal Planning Stages Prepare the concept of your website: What’s the main idea? Figure out what kind of content you want to serve. *CONTENT IS KING. Create a basic sitemap and features list. Go shopping for: Modules Themes

Drupal Is Platform Agnostic Allows for modularity and extensibility You can install: Apache/ IIS / Unix / Linux / BSD / Solaris / Windows / Mac OS X Database Independence: you can use both MySQL and PostgreSQL (ask me about even cooler stuff)

The Drupal “Stack” Apache (lighttpd, IIS) MySQL (PostgresSQL, SQL Server, Oracle) PHP PHPMyAdmin for adminisering your SQL Database Linux (BSD, Mac OS, Windows, Solaris)

Drupal Core

Drupal Is Modular

Drupal “Stack”

PHP: Generates Dynamic Content HTML <?PHP Page ?> Client <?PHP Web HTML Page PHPTemplate ?> Drupal Core Browser HTML <?PHP Page ?> Drupal MySQL Database (Views Is Basically a Query Builder)

Displaying Page To Browser 1. Browser retrieves dynamic information from the database. 2. Browser checks retrieved data against relevant output filters. 3. Server Inserts information into each core template. 4. Theme Engine Merges template files into template.php 5. Browser displays formatted page in the Web Browser.

Themes Multiple Template Engines Available, though the most common is PHPTemplate Total customization possible by using CSS Writing custom template ﬁles Overriding template.php functions Writing a subtheme

Drupal 6.x Separating Design & Logic • .info files define your theme • More templates = more control, better separation • Better phptemplate_variables() • Theme inheritance makes subtheming and overriding possible • Pure CSS themes are also possible

Drupal “Core” Allows You To: Customize the layout with regions and block and any number of pages. Personalize logos, settings, themes, add blocks and customize templates Use a multi-level menu system - primary, secondary, tertiary, whatever you like Allow multiple people to create and edit content Utilize “roles” and ﬂexible account privileges Use a hierarchical taxonomy to categorize content, use tagging Access statistics/logging and use advanced search functions

PHPTemplate Engine Wrapper that interfaces Drupal Template Language • Understands HTML & PHP Statements for Dynamic Data • Comes installed, so you need not touch it. • File Extension - *.tpl.php • Handles - page.tpl.php, front-page.tpl.php, node.tpl.php, comment.tpl.php, forum.tpl.php

3 Common block.tpl.php Template Files Navigation Blog Post 1 Who’s Online node.tpl.php Syndicate Blog Post 2 page.tpl.php

Each Template Handles A Region of Your Site • page.tpl.php - Entire Page • front-page.tpl.php - Just Front Page • block.tpl.php - Blocks • comment.tpl.php - Comments • forum.tpl.php - Forums

Template Hierarchy - Specific before General Home Page Nodes page-front.tpl.php node-type.tpl.php page.tpl.php node.tpl.php Comments Pages comment.tpl.php page-node-edit.tpl.php page-node-1.tpl.php page-node.tpl.php Blocks page.tpl.php block-module-delta.tpl.php block-module.tpl.php Boxes block-region.tpl.php block.tpl.php box.tpl.php

Theme vs. Sub-Theme

Modules

2. Installation

Acquia Drupal Localhost Installation Download the Acqiua Drupal Stack Installer Unzip Run installation GUI Set up Database name and click through to see your new Drupal Site!

Installation Localhost: Acquia Drupal Stack Installer WampServer XAMPP MAMP 3rd Party Server: Make sure host supports Drupal stack, upload ﬁles and create database on server.

Other Installation Options XAMP - Windows, Does not work well with Mac. WAMP - Windows MAMP - I use this on Mac OS X WampServer - This is the one we will use if the Acquia Stack Installer does not work out.

Installing on 3rd Party FTP Shell/ SSH / Command Line wget tar -xvzf DATABASE Database name User name and password Host (localhost on your machine)

3. Site Conﬁguration

admin_menu Administration menu module provides a theme-independent administration interface (aka. "navigation", "back-end") for Drupal. It's a helper for novice Drupal users coming from other CMS, a real time-saver for Drupal site administrators, and deﬁnitely a must for Drupal developers and site builders (keyword: Devel integration). The module renders all administrative menu items below 'administer' in a clean, attractive and purely CSS-based menu at the top of your website. It contains not only regular menu items - local tasks are also included, giving you extremely fast access to any administrative resource and function your Drupal installation provides.

What You Can Do With Core Enable your blog Conﬁgure your site Write content Create roles Create blocks & move them around

Site Configuration Create the first user Go to admin page - handle errors Site configuration - file system Enable clean URLs Enable modules Creat roles and 2nd user

Add Content Blog Story Pages Enable Taxonomy to Create Content Categories Install admin_menu before doing anything else

Creating News (For example) 1. Create Vocabulary (administer>>categories>> add vocabulary tab called “News” with “story” checked under “Types:”, “Hierarchy:”, set to “Disabled”, uncheck “Multiple select” and check “Required” 2. Create terms (administer>>categories>>add terms) Under this “News” Vocabulary as follows: “News,” “Media Releases” and “Events”

4. Installing More Modules

Where to Get More Modules http://drupal.org/project/Modules How to ﬁgure out which modules are best Read “Using Drupal” from O’REILLY Go to www.drupalmodules.com

Essential Contrib. Modules admin_menu FCKeditor CCK IMCE Views Fileﬁeld Bueditor SEOchecklist

CCK Module Allows you to add custom ﬁelds to nodes using a web browser. Drupal comes with core content types like story and blog. For each content type, I can go to 'create content' and submit a new story, blog entry, etc. That's great if I can tailor my content needs to ﬁt those models of pure chunks of text with or without attachments.

Views Module Provides a ﬂexible method for Drupal site designers to control how lists and tables of content (nodes in Views 1, almost anything in Views 2) are presented. Traditionally, Drupal has hard-coded most of this, particularly in how taxonomy and tracker lists are formatted. This tool is essentially a smart query builder that, given enough information, can build the proper query, execute it, and display the results. It has four modes, plus a special mode, and provides an impressive amount of functionality from these modes.

Bueditor Module Editor interface and button functionality are completely customizable through administration pages. It supports role based editor interfaces. It's possible to create image or text buttons. Buttons can be customized to generate code snippets, html tags, bbcode tags etc.

IMCE Module Used as a ﬁle browser in many popular rich text editors such as FCKEditor, TinyMCE, WYMEditor, Whizzywig etc. It can been also used for inline image/ﬁle insertion into textareas. This is a built-in feature that can be used stand-alone or with a text editor such as BUEditor.

Filefield Module Configurable upload paths allow you to save files into per-field or per-user directories Per-field and per-node file size limits Extensive API for extending field widgets and managing files Full revision/translation file management Views support

SEO Checklist Provides a checklist of good Drupal SEO (Search Engine Optimization) best practices. Provides a checklist that helps you keep track of what needs to be done. Looks to see what modules you already have installed. Then, all you have to do is go down the list of unchecked items and do them. When all the items are checked, you're done!

More Modules Spam Control - Mollom Google Analytics - drupal.org/project/google_analytics Pathauto - drupal.org/project/pathauto Token - drupal.org/project/token Update module - drupal.org/project/update_status etc...

Best Practices Don’t Hack Core! Account and Roles Plan for future upgrades Back up both the database and the ﬁles regularly Use sites/all/modules and sites/all/themes Avoid spaces in any directory name

Community Websites

Self-Taught Drupal http://www.drupal.org www.learnbythedrop.com www.lullabot.com Books: Pro Drupal Development, Using Drupal, Learning Module Development, Front-End Drupal, etc...

Multi-Language Support You can have a site in three languages, or more: English Hungarian Spanish System is independent of the language, the author deﬁnes it

IRC Is a Big Resource - Support exhange - Collaboration in ideas, code & events - Local user groups

Useful Links api.drupal.org drupal.org/handbooks drupalchat.net is.gd/15tJF - Chatzilla Firefox plugin is.gd/15vNY - Wikipedia IRC client comparison drupal.org/forum drupal.org/project/issues

Me: Lauren N. Roth 512.461.5313, lauren@laurennroth.com Assisting at Installation Fest Wednesday July 15th at 7:15pm - Union Park downtown Speaking at Drupalcamp Dallas in early August Introducing Drupal at Austin Developers and Designers Meeting on August 11th

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Introduction To Drupal

by Lauren Roth on Jul 15, 2009

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Introduction To Drupal — Presentation Transcript