Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6

Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6 | 5.5 MB
The book is designed to be read sequentially and assumes very little prior Drupal knowledge, though a little familiarity with the interface would be helpful, and a lot of willingness to explore and experiment are going to be necessary for complete newcomers. The first few chapters-focussed on explaining the benefits of using drupal and guide the user through the initial setup-are a little clunky and may deter those not comfortable with installing databases and scripting languages. The style improves as the book progresses and Mercer covers his topics well, with a considerably better structure than several Packt publications I’ve seen lately.

This book updates the bestselling Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, and Community Websites for Drupal 6, the latest, much improved version of this popular open-source Content Management System. Targeting readers with little experience in website design, unfamiliar with PHP, MySQL or HTML, and with little to no experience of Drupal, it looks pragmatically at the steps needed from knowing you want a website right through to designing and building it like a pro, and then successfully managing and maintaining it. Experienced author David Mercer uses a friendly, engaging style that is clear and concise, allowing readers to advance rapidly until they can tackle any problem with confidence. Drupal is an elegantly designed, well-supported and flexible open-source CMS platform that empowers anyone to create a website or blog and is rapidly becoming first choice of people in the know. With this powerful tool you need not pay professionals to design a site; you can do the job yourself.

CHAPTER 1 covers how Drupal came to be and what it has to offer. You get a tour of the Drupal web site. (Mercer mentions the sheer number of support-related posts in the Drupal forums: 200,000). Forums have an advantage over Drupal’s IRC channels: forums are archived, and hence searchable.

In CHAPTER 2, we install Apache2Triad on our development machine. Once we’ve set up our local server, we download and install Drupal 6 using a fresh database. (We are directed to an appendix to learn how to upgrade a Drupal 5 web site to Drupal 6.) Cron jobs are not discussed at this point, the author points us to chapter 10, ‘Managing your web site’, where they receive a fair treatment. The following is often overlooked: we (as ‘admin’) can view the Administer section ‘By module’, rather than ‘By task’, which is the default. Mercer makes good use of this particular view. In this chapter, we also get to install and configure a contributed module, DHTML Menu. (A module you won’t be able to live without.)

In CHAPTER 3, we build a wildlife and conservation web site. We install forums and create content for them, we post a comment, and we learn how to use blocks. We take a close look at the search module configuration page. We learn that we can weigh the importance of three indexing criteria, which affect the order of search results. I learned how to re-index a web site, and then run cron.php manually so that the re-indexing is done right away. This can be very useful. Say you want to place Ad-Sense ads on your site. You need to remove some words from your content, before you seek approval from the censors at Google. You edit your content, but some words still turn up in your web site search results. You are in a hurry, so you want to re-index your content right away. You go to admin/settings/search and press on the button ‘Re-index site’. Then you go to admin/reports/status/run-cron. In this chapter, we also create a custom block.

CHAPTER 4 covers things we modify or set usually only once, such as clean URLs and the download method. We learn that aliasing is a good idea, and are invited to skip ahead and learn how to use the modules Path and Pathauto, covered in chapter 10. We learn how to be both user and search engine friendly.

CHAPTER 5 covers ‘who does what’ on the web site, ie: permissions, roles, and access rules. We’re reminded in this chapter that any user who has an admin-defined role (such as role moderator) is also an authenticated user. Also, a user who belongs to role x and role y will get combined permissions of roles x and y. That means that if role x is allowed to Do Something, and role y isn’t, the user will be able to Do Something. That is why one should create special roles by adding the specific additional permissions that are required by that role, and no more. (p.126). Very wise.

In CHAPTER 6, we learn how to generate simple content and administer it. There is a very nice coverage of the core modules Aggregator and Book.

You can download CHAPTER 7, ‘Advanced Content’, from the publisher’s web site. This chapter covers taxonomy and custom content type creation. We learn that a taxonomy is a hierarchy of ‘terms’, unlike thesauri, which define ‘is similar to’ relationships. The contributed module Similar By Terms is mentioned. We learn that multiple vocabularies can be used to provide faceted tagging, although the example used by Mercer to illustrate this concept is weak. It’s only further down the road in one of the last chapters (and not by accident, I believe) that we learn that it’s possible to access lists of content through their tagged terms using system paths such as /taxonomy/term/1+4.

Coverage of CCK is excellent. We download the contrib module Fivestar to learn how to add a ‘contributed field’ to a content type, but it’s not clear why we would want to do this when we can enable the Fivestar widget for any content type (another contrived how-to example). The chapter also covers input formats and filters, how the former can be created, and how the latter can be rearranged (the order in which they are applied). When creating a ‘feature-rich’ page, we attach an image file to our node, and display the image in the content using an tag with the ’src’ attribute set to: http://localhost/mf4good/sites/default/files/team.jpg. This link will be broken when the file structure will change, such as after deployment. A site root-relative path is preferred: /sites/default/files/team.jpg or, in the case where the content may be posted on another web site through a feed, the URL of the file is even better: http://mf4good.com/sites/default/files/team.jpg.

CHAPTER 8 discusses theming. As an exercise, we download, install and customize the Barlow theme. The modifications we bring to it are simple: we upload a new logo, style blocks by modifying block.tpl.php and adding a few rules to style.css, change the background image.

In CHAPTER 9, we learn about Actions and Triggers, new-to-Drupal 6 modules. We also learn how to install a language translation the wrong way ;-) We learn to add a new language and then import to it a .po file that we download from drupal.org. When in fact, no manual ‘import’ is necessary. What needs to be done is 1) Get the translation tar ball (*.tar.gz file) from http://drupal.org/project/Translations, then move this file to your web root (in the same folder as index.php), then extract the file. Every extracted .po files (as there are many, many) end up where they’re supposed to be. (The translation package has a tree structure.) Then, add the language (going to admin/settings/language/add). The importing of all .po files is then done automatically for you by Drupal.

In CHAPTER 10, we learn how to use the modules Path and Pathauto for path aliasing. We learn how to run crontab, and how to make a backup of our web site. Mercer provides a checklist to help with Search Engine Optimization.

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