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DrupalDrupalCurrently viewing this thread: 2 (0 members and 2 guests)  November 5th, 2007 12:49 AM Drupal Man, with all the good things some people have said about it, I'm wondering where I can learn all there really is to be done with this CMS. Anyone have any good documentation on how it all works? ___________________ Holy ****, its Dean fucking Venture! November 5th, 2007 03:18 AM I'm putting together some of my collection of resources for you... I'm going through my Drupal bookmarks and organizing a list based on the topic/task, common questions, etc (e.g. theming, working with CCK and Views module, etc). I'm also including my personal "module list" that includes all of my own selection of Drupal modules I recommend (which might help, since there are literally thousands of modules listed on Drupal.org and it can be overwhelming). Even my list is a touch overwhelming haha - though I'll try to sort it a bit by "must have" versus "nice to have, if you need it". As I've been making this list, it was funny that the thought occurred to me how much easier it would be for me to organize and present this info using Drupal Anyhow, the list won't be "everything" or nearly my ideal presentation and organization of the resources, but I'll try to post up whatever I've got within the hour so you can get started ___________________ -- Dave
November 5th, 2007 06:04 AMLearning Drupal - version 0.1 Alright, here is version 0.1 of "Learning Drupal with Dave" haha General - Best Learning Resources Work/practice on a local server environment General Concepts Understanding Input Formats and Filters http://www.lullabot.com/articles/drupal_input_formats_and_filters Theming Drupal pre-made Themes Working with CCK & Views http://drupal.org/node/168752#comment-263585 (Create a CCK type and random block view) Making a custom photo (or audio/video) gallery (also good CCK/Views practice) Ways of making a custom front/home page Also see: http://drupal.org/node/206792 (Creating a new front page with Views and Panels 2) The most basic "built-in" front/home pages in Drupal are to either 1) Leave it as default in a "blog style" format where your latest content is displayed automatically on the home page, or 2) Create any page and set it to show as your home page at yoursite.com/admin/settings/site-information (set the "Default front page" value to the address of that page). This isn't an ideal way if you want "dynamic" content on your home page though, so fortunately there are a number of better options available. Understanding Panels module Backing up and Upgrading Drupal Drupal module reviews and feedback My personally recommended modules: Must haves - CCK (see Working with CCK & Views) - Views (see Working with CCK & Views) - Contemplate (this module lets you override how fields in CCK are displayed in your theme on a more granular level - usually I only use the module to learn what code it would suggest, then copy/paste that into my theme files, since I prefer to keep everything related to theming together in real files). - Imagefield (Lets you add images as a field in CCK. For instance you could have a field requiring an image with every news post. Imagefield works hand-in-hand with Imagecache module, allowing you to control the size of the images that will be shown on the page - Devel (for basic users this module's a bit overkill, though very useful if you're developing a custom module of your own. Recommended though since it lets you easily clear the caches in case something gets jammed up, view a page as if you were a different user instead of admin, etc). - Imagecache (Imagecache is amazing. What it allows you to do is to create "presets" that you can process your uploaded images with, making an unlimited number of derivative (resized, cropped, etc) versions of your image and never actually editing the original version). For instance, you can have a Thumbnail preset that is shown on teasers and listings, a Normal preset for when the image is viewed inside the page, and a Large version to show full screen using Thickbox module). - Custom Breadcrumbs (breadcrumbs work automatically if the page is listed in the Menu system, but if your page isn't in the menu - for instance a news post, video, etc, this module lets you setup some rules to ensure those pages get breadcrumbs too). - Global Redirect (important for search engine optimization - Drupal's Path module (or the contributed Pathauto module) can make friendly paths instead of node/43 for example (each node has a unique number)... however the same page is then accessible from node/43 and articles/some-name (or whatever you call it). Global Redirect adds a setting to ensure that node/43 automatically sends you to articles/some-name, making it just a single path leading to that page). - Paging (allows you to break content into multiple pages using a simple tag, or a "Drupalbreak" toolbar button if you use TinyMCE or FCKEditor). - Pathauto (automatically adds "search engine friendly" URLs to all your pages, according to rules you set). - Token (a prerequisite module that gives functionality to other modules, such as Pathauto above) - SimpleMenu or Drupal Administration Menu (adds a dynamic hierarchical menu system to the top of the page. Drupal Administration Menu shows just the admin menu, while SimpleMenu can be used for that and show other "visitor accessible" menus as well. I used SimpleMenu because I add an admin-visible-only "Shortcuts" menu that I use to list all of my most commonly accessed pages and tools). - Thickbox (a great way of automatically showing a full screen view of a photo when a visitor clicks on a thumbnail image on the page). - Update status (will be part of Drupal 6 core... makes it super easy to keep your modules up to date, and notifies you whenever there are security patches available). - Panels (lets you pull a wide variety of pages, views, blocks, and other content using a visual UI and arrange them as a single page using preset or custom layouts of columns and rows (the new alpha 2.x version even lets you drag and drop the content around between panels, among many other new features)... you can get a similar end result with manual coding in your theme, but this makes it sooo easy. This is handy not only for designing your site's home page, but also designing more complex section pages or other special pages on your site where you want to mix together and list a variety of content). - JQuery Update (updates Drupal's version of jQuery so you can make use of more modern jQuery plug-ins). Recommended Modules: Nice-to-have, or If you need 'em - Img_Assist (as mentioned above, an add-on that facilitates adding images "inline" into content). - IMCE (has a horrible interface, but worth giving a try - allows you to insert images inline into content without requiring Image module - the images are just normal files uploaded to your server). - Printer-friendly pages (adds a customizable printer friendly version of every page). - SmartyPants (converts plain text quotes and dashes into typographically-correct characters) - Full WYSIWYG editors: TinyMCE, FCKEditor - Basic code editors/helpers: BBCode with BBCode Formatting Bar, Quicktags (which adds buttons to insert basic HTML or BBCode),Textile, Texy - Node Queue (allows you to select pages and queue them up in a certain order... you can then manually rotate through the list, or automatically using Actions module). - Actions (will be part of Drupal 6 core) - Workflow - Javascript Tools (in particular, I'm a fan of the Active Menu sub-module) - XML Sitemap (automatically generates a Google sitemap based on your site's content). - Persistent Login (adds a "Remember me" checkbox to keep users logged in) - Find URL Alias (helpful for locating a path alias when you have a large number of them) - HTML Correcter (will be part of Drupal 6 core) - Menu scout (helpful dynamic search to quickly find things in the Admin panel) - JQuery Interface (adds support for the jQuery Interface add-on... only install this if other modules request it). - Page title (custom control of page <title> instead of using the node title) - Custom Pagers (adds previous and next links on content types of your choice, allowing visitors to cycle through the articles of that type). - SimpleNews (a really nice integrated newsletter system, that ties in directly with your site's registered users and allows them to control their subscriptions through their account options). ... there are also a number of choices for modules dealing with audio/video, which I'll go into later. Various common questions - will add more later Special topics to cover in detail - will add later Special groups of links on tricky issues - will add later Tips and Tricks - will add ___________________ -- Dave
Last edited by AbsoluteCross, August 24th, 2008 09:40 AM (Edited 17 times) November 5th, 2007 07:53 AMWow, that is really, really useful! How would you rate Drupal's forum system, in comparison with vBulletin? ___________________ Holy ****, its Dean fucking Venture! November 5th, 2007 08:46 AMThe forum module that comes with Drupal core is very basic (essentially it is a comment system with some extra features - the primary topic is a custom node type, similar to a Page or Story, and the replies are comments, in the same way all nodes in Drupal can have comments). Fortunately however, the forum is extensible in the same way everything in Drupal is (it's my opinion that it should be much less sparse out of the box and require less work and understanding on the end user's part to get up and running, since the average user does want something at least in the same ballpark as the popular forum software, but the people doing the development don't necessarily agree). Even with a lot of add-ons, the Drupal forum is hard pressed to compare feature for feature with vBulletin, which initially was a downside for me. However after sitting down and being completely honest with myself about what features are really necessary, I've decided I really don't want a mega forum like vBulletin after all (especially at the loss of "full" integration with the rest of the site and continuity of the user experience, difficulty upgrading, theming across two systems, etc - which despite several very good bridging options, is still a mountain of a problem). You can get a grasp on what can be added to the Drupal forum, and some of the proposed plans that people are advocating for the core forum in the future on the DruBB project group, where the core forum planning has been done lately by contributors: http://groups.drupal.org/drubb Given all of the possible add-ons to the forum, and others that aren't necessarily listed there, I still have a good number of items on my wishlist for the forum (I did a pretty thorough analysis of vBulletin and some choice vB.org mods, and outlined positive attributes that I like to see in a forum without tipping into "everything but the kitchen sink" mode as vB tends towards. I'll be happy to share my research once I put it into some form of organized format. If you weigh your options and do decide you want vBulletin or another forum, then there are some good bridge modules to connect the user databases of a number of forums with Drupal (all should be listed in the modules directory, except for my preferred vBulletin integration, Drupaltin, which has a pretty solid 1.0 version out, and a much better 2.0 in the works). So far as my choice... well I haven't got to the point of no return yet, but I'm pretty sold at this point on putting my time, effort, and funding into improving the Drupal forum. With add-ons it can do the most necessary stuff I require, and the remaining wishlist can be fulfilled over time. ___________________ -- Dave
November 5th, 2007 08:34 PM Whoa, excellent resource list. This should make getting familiar with Drupal a breeze. Thanks a lot. ___________________ Warning: Dangerous if taken seriously. June 2nd, 2008 07:48 PMSuper old thread revival, RAWR! Anyways, Dave, I've gotten much more familiar now with Drupal and I understand quite a bit. However, what do you think about Drupal 6.x? Like it better or worse? I'm waiting and hoping that some modules get released pretty soon for D6... heh ___________________ Holy ****, its Dean fucking Venture! June 2nd, 2008 11:53 PMHey Mark - I do really like Drupal 6, but like most people I'm awaiting the release of a number of critical modules for it before I can even consider using it for anything. It's funny, but so much of Drupal's functionality (at least for a non-coder like myself... guys who can code their own modules, use the Drupal API, etc aren't as affected) is wrapped up in 2 modules: CCK and Views. Without them I can't do much I'd say Drupal 6 doesn't have "a lot" of new functionality I currently need (e.g. I love the new drag and drop replacement for the weight system, menu system performance, refined role permissions, overall performance, block caching - though there's a contrib module for 5, significant improvements in theming - not to mention the Firebug-like "theme developer" plugin for Devel module, and Views 2 which will be Drupal 6+ only and is vastly better)... but the biggest upgrade overall to D6 was the internationalization (i18n) features, which on my sites I don't have much use for at the moment. I'd love to release the new NS initially on Drupal 6 (other benefits aside, especially and mainly because of what Views 2 can do), but my hope for it working out in time is fading... maybe but not sure. Too many must-have modules I need for the site are either not yet fully stable on 6, or not even started being ported, a few with timelines as far as several months away for release. My tentative plan is to spend time working on the design and HTML for now, and if after that it's not ready, go with 5, and do my best to use only modules that "do" have a clear upgrade plan to 6 even if they're not ready yet. Then upgrading down the line won't be as much of a significant hassle. Some of the forum improvements I've been hoping for didn't make it into 6 even (got pushed to 7) and so I'm figuring out what feature requests to make for Advanced Forum module, and even expecting to pay for some development if needed (as there are at least 2 nasty queries in the Drupal forum module that are not at all efficient on a huge site like ours... if that doesn't work out I may have to do a little unfortunate hacking of forum.module and/or hire someone to write a module to collect and display the post/thread counts more efficiently, the way it's done on current NS). I'm going to talk to a few other owners of Drupal-based forums that have similar thread/post counts what they have done in their case (e.g. maybe query caching, etc).... we have about 91,000 nodes and 715,000 comments, and unlike NS, Drupal tries to count these on the fly per forum category instead of pre-storing the numbers. It's still up in the air, but from what I've read it looks like forum module in Drupal 7 will finally get some much-needed attention... it may even be redesigned to use Views to generate much of its display (if Views core gets into Drupal core in time). Something to look forward to Anyhow, glad you're liking Drupal ___________________ -- Dave
Last edited by AbsoluteCross, June 3rd, 2008 12:14 AM (Edited 2 times) |
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Ultimately I'll put it together that was on my site once I'm running Drupal on absolutecross.com, but a text file will suffice for the moment haha
