Drupal – Page 5 – The Coding Pad

Moving on to Drupal 6… then 7

In our series of tutorials on how to build a website with Drupal for newbies, we created a simple website from start to finish using Drupal 5. Now it’s time to move on. Drupal 6 has been around and stable for a while now, and the Drupal.org website was recently upgraded to Drupal 6. The current version out is Drupal 6.10.

The developers at Drupal are now working on Drupal 7, and yesterday at DrupalCon, Dries Buytaert announced the Code Freeze date for Drupal 7 as September 1. What this means is that after September 1 of this year, no more new features will be accepted for addition into the Drupal Core for version 7. Instead, the developers and contributors will now start working on patches and fixes, on usability and all that other good stuff. Which means, before we know it, Drupal 7 will be here!

What does this mean for us?

Continue reading “Moving on to Drupal 6… then 7”

Most Useful Drupal Resources on the Web

So as you all know I’ve been getting deep into Drupal in the last few months. I have a lot of things going on right now around Drupal and other projects and I can’t wait to blog about them. For starters though I want to share with all of you my personal list of the most useful drupal resources on the web.

Drupal Tutorials and Resources

Obviously, Drupal.org leads the way as the number one most useful Drupal resource on the web. With a prodigious amount of online documentation in the handbooks and forums, you will find almost everything you need there. The Documentation section is divided into sections – Getting Started, Beyond the Basics, and so on. The forums are also divided into sections to allow you to find answers and ask questions.

Lullabot follows as my number 2 most useful Drupal resource on the web. With numerous tutorials in screencast form and podcasts, Lullabot offers a tremendous amount of useful training and information on using and developing for Drupal. Lullabots describe themselves as Drupal experts. They write books and articles, publish videos, and roll out weekly podcasts about Drupal and building web sites. They also offer public and private training, as well as ongoing consulting relationships. I am currently working through a Lullabot book “Using Drupal” which I will be reviewing here soon. Lullabot is easily my favorite Drupal resource.

Continue reading “Most Useful Drupal Resources on the Web”

Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions – A Review

I want to preface this review by saying that this is the very first Drupal book I have ever owned, and I’m very excited about it.

I started working with Drupal last year and quickly fell in love with it. I begun building websites and learning as I went from the numerous Drupal tutorials online and the Drupal website documentation, and by experimenting by myself. Because I learn best by seeing things done and doing them myself, I am constantly in search of resources that teach me how to build something, not just theoretical descriptions. Theoretical descriptions are good and have their place, but the best way to learn how to do something is to DO it. I have created a series of tutorials on building a website with drupal from scratch, that are based on Drupal 5. But it’s time to move on to Drupal 6, and as before, the best way to learn is to do.

That is why I am so excited about the book Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions by Mark Noble. The book tackles learning Drupal by walking you through the process of building a fully functional small business website from start to end. There is no fluff in this book. It starts you from the beginning and goes step by step, explaining the theoretical aspects and the whys along with the hows, which I think is the most appealing thing about it. There are no abstract explanations just for the sake of it, everything fits into the scheme of building the website.

The author starts out by laying out the needs of the new websites, outlining the differences between a traditional static HTML website and a dynamic CMS based website, and then pointing out the advantages AND disadvantages of using Drupal. He then jumps right into the creation of the Good Eatin’ Bistro website. Like I said, no fluff, you start getting your hands dirty and seeing Drupal at work right from the beginning of the book.

Continue reading “Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions – A Review”

Building a Website with Drupal for Newbies – Adding Content

This is the sixth segment in my series of tutorials on building a Drupal website from scratch. I have been working on a lot of stuff and sort of drifted away from working on these tutorials, but I’m back to finish this up. This definitely won’t be the very last Drupal tutorial I ever do. I anticipate that you’ll be seeing a lot more Drupal related stuff at the Coding Pad, but this will wrap up the beginner basic stuff on getting the website completed.

OK,so far we’ve Introduced Drupal, learned how to install Drupal, we then set up and configured a Drupal site, and we went over how to build the Drupal site with blocks, menus, and modules. Finally, in our last tutorial, we talked about content. Recall that I have been working on a website concurrently with this tutorial: The Drupal Pad, and everything in these tutorials is implemented on that site.

So in the last tutorial we looked at the options under creating content,and we discussed the various default content types. So why don’t we go ahead and start fleshing out our website. Recall I said that we would start out by installing the Pathauto module so we would get our urls looking good from the start? I’ve decided to make that the topic of a different Drupal tutorial so as not to get things too complicated. Let’s just go into content for now and we’ll look at Pathauto in the next Drupal tutorial.

Continue reading “Building a Website with Drupal for Newbies – Adding Content”

Building a Website with Drupal for Newbies – About Content

This is the fifth segment in a series of posts on how to build a Drupal website from scratch. In the time since I wrote the last Drupal post, I have been learning more and delving deeper into the power and beauty of Drupal, and will be sharing a lot more in future posts, but these next two posts will wrap up the basics of building a Drupal website.

If you’ve been following this series, we have Introduced Drupal, learned how to install Drupal, we then set up and configured a Drupal site, and finally we went over how to build the Drupal site with blocks, menus, and modules. The site that I have been working on concurrently with this tutorial is The Drupal Pad, and everything in these tutorials is implemented on that site.

In this final section, we’re going to look at adding content to our site. We have a pretty basic website at this point, with a basic front page but not much else.

Drupal comes with some inbuilt content “types”, with the ability to create more. This ability to create and custom design your own content types is one of the things that makes Drupal a really powerful CMS, and we will go more into detail on this later. The two main content types built into Drupal are “Story” and “Page”.

By definition, Stories are articles in their simplest form: they have a title, a teaser and a body, but can be extended by other modules. The teaser is part of the body too. Stories may be used as a personal blog or for news articles. So you could use the story type to create news articles, blog post type of entries (if you don’t want to enable the blog module), articles, etc. On the other hand, a page is useful if you want to add a static page, like a contact page or an about page. I find myself using pages for things such as Site Disclaimers, Terms of Use, etc.

If you enabled the blog module or the poll module, then you’ll have extra content types, the Poll, and the Blog Entry.

Continue reading “Building a Website with Drupal for Newbies – About Content”