Transcript Building a Drupal Blog

Drupal and the
CMS Project
Lesson Learned #1
• Keep your modules updated, especially
when there are security concerns in the
update notes
2010 | The Sky’s the Limit
Update Status Email
• From: <[email protected]>
Date: Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 3:39 PM
Subject: New release(s) available for <Your Site Name>
To: [email protected]
There are security updates available for one or more of
your modules or themes. To ensure the security of your
server, you should update immediately!
See the available updates page for more information:
http://www.yoursite.com/admin/reports/updates
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Update Status Report
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Lesson Learned #2
• Set up a cron job or Windows
scheduled task to hit cron.php on your
Drupal installation at regular intervals
• Usually every hour
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The Drupal /sites folder
• When you install Drupal, the /sites folder contains
2 directories, “all” and “default”
• You can host additional sites by making new
directories in the /sites folder with the name of the
site and copying the settings.php file there from
the default directory
– For instance, /sites/krisbase.com
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The Drupal /sites folder
• Modules and themes you want available to every
site go in the /sites/all/modules and
/sites/all/themes folders
• Modules you only want available to a specific site
go in that site’s modules and themes folders
– ex. /sites/krisbase.com/modules
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Lesson Learned #3
• Don’t modify the Drupal Core files
• (Don’t touch anything outside of the /sites
directory)
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The End of the Road
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Hooks in Drupal
• foo_bar()
– “foo” is the name of the module
– “bar” is the name of the hook
• uwblogs_block()
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Theme Developer Module
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Lesson Learned #4
• There is a module for that!
• Most common needs already have one or
more modules built to address them
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Drupal Inline Image Solutions
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Linodef +
Linodef Taglists +
Linodef WYSIWYG +
WYSIWYG
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Drupal Inline Image Solutions
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Image +
Image Assist +
WYSIWYG +
TinyMCE
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Drupal Inline Image Solutions
• Imagefield +
• Imagefield Assist +
• Imagecache
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Drupal Inline Image Solutions
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Imagebrowser (v1) +
Image +
ImageCache +
FCKEditor
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Drupal Inline Image Solutions
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Imagebrowser (v2) +
WYSIWYG +
ImageCache +
Views
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Drupal Inline Image Solutions
• Inline
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Drupal Inline Image Solutions
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Insert +
WYSIWYG +
ImageField +
ImageCache
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Drupal Inline Image Solutions
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Media +
Styles +
WYSIWYG +
CKEditor
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Drupal Inline Image Solutions
• Nodereference Explorer, +
• Insert +
• WYSIWYG
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Drupal Inline Image Solutions
• Prosepoint Modules
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Drupal Inline Image Solutions
• WYSIWYG +
• CKEditor (js) +
• WYSIWYG Image Upload
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Drupal Inline Image Solutions
• WYSIWYG +
• CKEditor (js) +
• CKFinder
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Drupal Inline Image Solutions
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Module Description
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Bug and Issue Queues
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Project Information (good)
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Project Information (yikes!)
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Sometimes modules don’t
play nicely together
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Now what?
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Lesson Learned #5
• Contributed modules go in the
/sites/all/modules folder
• or /sites/<sitename>/modules
• not in /modules folder with the core
modules that ship with Drupal
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Enabling Modules with Drush
• Navigate to one of your Drupal sites in the shell
• drush dl <module_name> downloads the most recent
production version of the module
• drush en <module_name> enables it
• You can also disable modules with drush, which is handy
if you have a WSOD and can’t access your admin menu
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Drush .make Files
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Drupal Commons
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Managing News
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Open Atrium
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Blog Requirements
• Bloggers should be able to tag their posts
– Should be simple using the Drupal Taxonomy module
– Tags should have auto-complete functionality and
bloggers should only see the suggestions that they
previously entered
• Blogs should share some taxonomies
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Blog Requirements
• Bloggers should be able to use a
WYSIWYG editor so they can style their
posts without HTML knowledge
• Bloggers should be able to upload photos
and place them where they want in their
posts
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Blog Requirements
• Users should be allowed to comment on
blog posts if the blogger allows it
• Users should be able to login with CAS
• The Blogger’s real name should appear
beside their posts, not their username
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Blog Requirements
• The blog must meet accessibility standards
• Blog owners should be allowed to customize
their banner image
• Blog owners should be able to add pages to
their blogs (ex. About Us)
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Blog Requirements
• Blogs should be allowed to have more
than one blogger
– For instance a blog for a research lab may
have several people posting to it
– The blog owner should have the ability to
moderate these posts
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Approach #1
Drupal Core Blog Module
• Drupal ships with a module that is described as a
“multi user blog”
– Each user can create a blog under their own
username
– A block is created that shows recent blog posts
– The Blog content type can be extended to meet some
of the requirements that are not met
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Approach #1
Drupal Core Blog Module
• It only provides one blog per user
• It doesn’t meet our requirements, let’s try
something else…
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Approach #2
Organic Groups
• Allows users to create and manage groups that
can have subscribers
• Each group can have more than one moderator
• Each group can have a different theme
• Blog posts can be tied to organic groups
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Approach #2
Organic Groups
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Approach #2
Organic Groups
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Approach #2
Organic Groups
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Approach #3: Custom Content Types
and Node Relationships
• Content Construction Kit
• Lets you extend nodes with custom fields
– Text, Links
– File and image uploads
– Links to taxonomies
– And much more!
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Approach #3: Custom Content Types
and Node Relationships
• We will make 2 custom content types
– Blogs and Blog Posts
– Blogs are tied to the users who are allowed to
post to them with a User Reference field
– Blog Posts are tied to Blogs with a Node
Reference field
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Approach #3: Custom Content Types
and Node Relationships
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Approach #3: Custom Content Types
and Node Relationships
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Lesson Learned #6
• Internet Explorer freaks out if you link
to more than 31 CSS files!
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Approach #3: Custom Content Types
and Node Relationships
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Approach #3: Custom Content Types
and Node Relationships
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Lesson Learned #7
• If the changes you make aren’t
appearing, be sure to clear your Drupal
cache
• (and possibly the browser cache as
well)
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Approach #3: Custom Content Types
and Node Relationships
For a specific post:
• http://blogs.uwaterloo.ca/kris-blog/2010/12/17/my-blog-post-name
For all posts in December:
• http://blogs.uwaterloo.ca/kris-blog/2010/12
For all posts in 2010:
• http://blogs.uwaterloo.ca/kris-blog/2010
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Approach #3: Custom Content Types
and Node Relationships
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Approach #3: Custom Content Types
and Node Relationships
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Approach #3: Custom Content Types
and Node Relationships
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Approach #3: Custom Content Types
and Node Relationships
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Approach #3: Custom Content Types
and Node Relationships
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Approach #3: Custom Content Types
and Node Relationships
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Conclusion
• Contributed modules will often get you
90% of the way there, but that last 10%
can be a killer
• It is worth the effort to use Drupal so we
can get our content into one place and do
fine grained searches on it
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