Drupal Intro

Drupal Intro - Transcript

Drupal Intro
An overview of the architecture features and basic site building workflow of the CMS
Chris Neglia and Lisa Forgan
Copyright 2009 Page1solutions LLC

What is Drupal
Open Source software written in php A CMS or content management system A sophisticated web application building tool

What is a CMS
Simply put a CMS is a website you build using the website itself
Wikipedia definition A content management system CMS such as a document management system DMS is a computer application used to manage work flow needed to collaboratively create edit review index search publish and archive various kinds of digital media and electronic text 1

What can Drupal be
blog Forum Online newspaper Portal Directory Brocure site portfolio flickr like photo drop Social community site job post board Video site like youtube Project management site CRM ERP SCM Wiki Shopping cart system E learning training site Dating site Anything you can think of

Why use a CMS
It helps manage complexity It provides a user interface UI for adding editing and publishing content It provides a means for collaboration among many to perform the above tasks

Why use Drupal over Wordpress
Wordpress was designed only to be a blog with some easy add ons Drupal was designed to be more of a generalist it s for making anything and is far more robust Wordpress could be the better choice for blogs since it is better at being a blog than Drupal This is something of debate Wordpress is still a sound choice of CMS for SEO and security so if wordpress satisfies a simpler project s requirements then by all means use it it is easier and faster to set up than Drupal Wordpress is not designed to be highly scalable to many simultaneous users nor does it have flexible roles permissions extensible content types nor does it have plentiful well tested quality add ons It has a few and a lot of really poor plugins Caveat Trying to force Wordpress to do something it cannot do easily with very popular plug ins can be worse than suffering the learning curve of Drupal





Why use Drupal over Joomla or other CMS
It has superior session handling for a CMS It has superior security It is a more consistent reliable and flexible framework for development It is considered better for SEO from our research It uses a separation of concerns architecture to cleanly and consistently separate structure function form and presentation in layers ie php from data as db xml layout and presentation as html and css It heavily uses defaults overrides in code in the form of hooks and in themes in the form of templates This makes it extremely flexible Other CMS es do a very very bad job of at least one of the above



Downsides to the Druup
Drupal has a steeper learning curve than wordpress or Joomla Drupal and it s developers make no excuse for this fact it is a robust flexible tool That said the drupal community is constantly addressing usability and user experience issues because they want the industry market share

What is a UI
UI is a user interface which is a general term for the layout of options widgets and settings used to configure the system or manage content Site building activities refer to configuring settings or managing content through the UI such as building navigation menus

Drupal Structure
Drupal is a database driven dynamic application It requires a database Drupal has a core filesystem whose functionality can be extended using the UI itself modules and themes The UI settings are stored in the database

Modules
Packages of files in a directory that you upload into drupal s module space sites all modules Add functionality to drupal Core Modules come shipped with drupal Contributed Modules are downloads from drupal org

Themes
Packages of files in a directory that you upload into drupal s theme space sites all themes Themes adjust the site layout and style Like skinning your media player Themes can be easily changed in the UI

Drupal Database
Drupal s database tracks things like Site and Module settings User s information Access information Logging information Permissions and User Roles System Paths Content and content metadata

Nodes
A node is the primary form of content in a drupal site At a minimum it is a title and a body and can be specialized A page and story for example are node types that have a specific node settings A node type is a blueprint for creating instances of content of a particular type

Nodes cont
Not everything in Drupal is a node This is important Ex A user is not a node A taxonomy is not a node An account is not a node Knowing this is important for evaluation of what can and cannot be easily done through the UI without additional programming

Layout and Regions
A Region is an area in a layout such as a header footer content left right sidebar into which blocks can be placed and arranged A block is a box containing some information A node resides only in the content area of the layout except in special circumstances Think of the content region as a big node block that allows other blocks in it but the node itself can t move

Blocks
Blocks are added by modules Blocks can contain views widgets menus nodes in special circumstances and panels Blocks can be moved around through the UI Blocks can be styled individually

Additional Terminology
Views an interface for making customized lists of the data contained in the drupal database Panels an interface for making customized layouts of nodes available to the panels module Widgets a general term for interactive form elements or graphs that are enabled by modules

Admin Menu
The administrative menu is a part of the UI that allows one to configure Drupal s settings The settings available depend on which modules are installed and enabled Permissions allow users to have administrative access to module settings

Users
All CMSes wordpress Joomla Drupal have a user login system users have a username pw Drupal also supports the concepts of 1 Roles and 2 Permissions Roles are user designations to groups having the same set of permissions

Anonymous User
A not logged in site visitor is called a guest visitor or anonymous user Has a user id uid of 0 zero All anonymous users belong to the anonymous user role a role ID of 1 and have a set of permissions assigned to them

Authenticated User
A user in drupal may belong to one or more roles Every registered user in Drupal belongs to at least the authenticated user role Authenticated user role has a role ID of 2

Root Admin User
The root user or root admin has the ability to do anything on the site and is a special user The root user has a user id uid of 1 The root user does NOT have rolepermissions to set because they are effectively gods within Drupal

Managing Permissions
KEY concept if you grant permission to an authenticated user it applies to ALL roles except the anonymous user To grant a permission to everyone on a site you must grant the permission to both the anonymous user and authenticated user

Managing Permissions
To grant permission to only a newly created dentist role tick the permission on that role Leave all the other roles deselected If you grant to both the dentist role AND the authenticated user role you would be doing it wrong Drupal assumes you know this

Recipe Change Site Information
In Administer Site Configuration Site Information Change the information to suit your site following the help text Don t change the Default front page just yet Click Save configuration

Recipe Change Date and Time
In Administer Site Configuration Date and Time Change the timezone to the correct time for America Denver 0600 UTC Change the time formats Click Save Configuration

Recipe Clean Urls
Clean URLs remove the q from the location bar in your web browser In Administer Site Configuration Clean Urls Tick Enabled Click Save Configuration

Clean Urls Issue
If Clean URLs is an unchangeable option then there is a misconfiguration of the drupal site hosting environment Contact your local IT support for assistance or consult the drupal handbook for more info For the purposes of this demo it s not important but it is important to enable later

Recipe Add a user
Go to Administer User Management Users Click Add user Choose options Click Create New Account

Recipe Add a user
A user can also add themselves by registering if the root user has allowed this option Go to Administer User Management User Settings Tick Visitors can create accounts and no administrator approval is required Click Save Configuration

Recipe Add Roles
You will note that anonymous and authenticated users are there by default undeletable Type in the box below the roles in the Name column Click add role That s it

Recipe Edit Delete role
Click edit next to the role name Here you can change the name or delete the role Warning If you click delete role there is NO confirmation This can be bad

Recipe Assign multiple roles to User
In Administer User Management Users Click the edit link under operations for a user Under Roles Tick an additional role you created You will notice authenticated user is locked

Recipe Altering Permissions
Under Administer User Management Permissions you will see there is a permissions column and role columns

Scroll down to the user module section

Tick change own username in the authenticated user column

Tick Save Permissions

Recipe Build Menu
Under Administer Site Building Menus



Click Primary Links On the Primary Links List Items page click Add Item In Path type contact In Menu link title type Contact Form Change weight to 50 drupal 6 x 10 in drupal 5 x Click Save You will notice that Contact Form appears now on the far right of your primary links Click it to go to the contact form

Recipe Create About Page
In the Navigation left sidebar click Create Content Click Page under the content type listing In the Title type About Us In the body type This is my first drupal page Expand the Menu settings fieldset In the Menu link title type About Us Change the weight to 49 Expand the URL path fieldset and type about us Click Save You should now see the About Us menu item in the Primary Link navigation Click it to go to this newly created node

Recipe Get modules
Default Drupal installs can only do so much Go to http drupalmodules com to find a module that supports what you are trying to do Do rely on the ratings here as they are tied to download popularity metrics from http drupal org

Note There are multiple places to change the email address for a site root user administrator You may have to dig around for them in admin menu when logged in as the root user Get login info from Salesforce In site information admin settings site information Site wide contact form settings admin build contact edit operation Mass contact settings if used admin build mass contact settings Mail settings different places ex uses mimemail admin settings mimemail User register notify admin settings register notify

Recipe Change Site Admin Email

Recipe Halp The site is messed up
If the login disappears and you can t login go to www yourdomain com user or www yourdomain com index php q user If clean URLs is not working substitute the first forward slash after the domain host with index php q without the quotes If all else fails call Chris or Alex to build a GUI interface in Visual Basic to track down the perpetrator in realtime

Installing Modules
Download from drupal or and Unpack module tarballs tar gz files to the folder inside Upload the module folder to drupal root sites all modules Create the modules and themes directories if they are not there Go to Administer Site Building Modules and tick Enabled next to the module to enable it and click Save Configuration

Using Modules
A newly enabled module will add an administration menu Go to that module and read the help before changing anything Play around and learn it s feature set Install the Advanced Help module to get more verbose help with modules

Modules Used on Almost every Drupal Site

Most Useful Contributed Modules
Administration CCK menu
SEO Checklist Search404 Menu Attributes Auto Assign Role patch WYSIWYG API Actions Addthis Diggthis Sharethis SEO Compliance Checker Meta Tags New XML Sitemap Ubercart FCKEditor Triggers

Views
Pathauto
Global GEOurl Site Map Date IMCE Notify Guestbook

String Overrides
Path Redirect
Html Purifier Taxonomy Manager Mollum Spam Chaos Tools Delegator Scheduler Simplenews

Backup and Migrate
Global Redirect
Page Title Token Captcha Panels

GoogAnalytics

Most Useful Contributed Modules for SEO

SEO Checklist

SEO Compliance Checker

Path Pathauto

Path Redirect

Global Redirect

Search404

Meta Tags

Global GEOurl

Html Purifier

Page Title

Menu Attributes

New XML Sitemap

Site Map

Advanced Open Calais RDF metadata WS

Most Useful Contributed Modules OLD
Administration menu SEO Checklist Search404 Menu Attributes Auto Assign Role patch WYSIWYG API Actions CCK SEO Compliance Checker Meta Tags New XML Sitemap Ubercart FCKEditor Triggers Date Addthis Diggthis Sharethis Advanced Advanced Apache Solr Search we cannot support yet Guestbook IMCE Notify Scheduler Chaos Tools Delegator Simplenews Panels GoogAnalytics Views Pathauto Global GEOurl Site Map String Overrides Path Redirect Html Purifier Taxonomy Manager Mollum Spam Backup and Migrate Global Redirect Page Title Token Captcha

Advanced Open Calais RDF metadata WS

Advanced Devel danger

Advanced PHPmailer SMTP Auth

A warning about using Free and Low Cost downloaded Themes
They are more difficult to customize than starting from scratch but faster to use Some of the markup is not seo friendly Some of the markup is over engineered and messy less is more Free or amateur low cost themes can be confusing if you look at the code this may impair your ability to learn drupal theming Some of the markup may be in tables or liquid layout and this may be hard to change for your particular project even if it looks nice to you Best practice suggests you either find a theme design and mimic its look andfeel or do the traditional photoshop mock up If you take someone else s theme you don t know what you re going to get and this can hinder your ability to develop

Getting free themes
http themegarden org drupal6 http drupal org project Themes http themebot com free website templates drupal themes

Google drupal themes you ll find a bunch of stuff Buyer beware

Most Useful Themes
Zen use starter kit to subtheme 960 grid based themes Garland use as admin theme

Blarland an evil copy of garland Place it in sites all themes and change the name of garland to blarland in folder and file names esp in the info file