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: its 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 projects 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 CMSes 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 its 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 drupals 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 drupals 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
Drupals database tracks things like : Site and Module settings, Users 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 cant 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 Drupals 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. Dont 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, its 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. Thats 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. Scroll to the bottom and click Save

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

Recipe : Change Site (Admin) Email

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: Halp! The site is messed up

If the login disappears and you cant 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 its feature set.

Install the Advanced Help module to get more verbose help with modules.

Modules Used on Almost every Drupal Site

Administration menu Panels + ctools + delegator Poormanscron CCK Views String Overrides Backup and Migrate

Token

Actions

Triggers Messaging, Messaging API Path Redirect Html Purifier Taxonomy Manager

Notify Mime Module & messaging-phpmailer Global Redirect Page Titles Scheduler

Webform SEO Compliance Checker Meta Tags XML Sitemap Wysiwyg-api, imce FCKeditor | TinyMCE Auto Assign Role (+patch)

Date + Date API

SEO Checklist Search404 Printer-friendly pages Captcha & Mollum || Spam Addthis || Diggthis Sharethis

Pathauto Global GEOurl Site Map ImageAPI & ImageCache

Google Analytics

Menu Attributes

Guestbook

Simplenews

Ubercart

Most Useful Contributed Modules

Administration menu
SEO Checklist Search404 Menu Attributes Auto Assign Role (+patch) WYSIWYG API Actions Addthis / Diggthis/ Sharethis

CCK
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 CCK SEO Compliance Checker Views Pathauto String Overrides Path Redirect Backup and Migrate Global Redirect

Search404
Menu Attributes Auto Assign Role (+patch) WYSIWYG API Actions

Meta Tags
New XML Sitemap Ubercart FCKEditor Triggers Date

Global GEOurl
Site Map

Html Purifier
Taxonomy Manager Mollum / Spam

Page Title
Token Captcha

IMCE Notify Scheduler Chaos Tools + Delegator Guestbook Simplenews Panels GoogAnalytics

Addthis / Diggthis/ Sharethis Advanced: Advanced: Apache Solr Search (we cannot support yet)

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-and-feel or do the traditional photoshop mock up. If you take someone elses theme, you dont know what youre 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 youll 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.