6 special howtos for drupal
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What else you’ve got?
Custom front pages. CAPTCHA support. Galleries of content. Javascript with jqueries. More display control with panels. More useful modules
Front_page module
Allows you to specify a custom front page based on role type.e.g. For a musicians website, you could have a
different front page for Drummers, Guitarists, Singers, Bass Players etc.
Allows you to have a FULL front page or FLASH SPLASH page – in a completely different layout from your main drupal site
CAPTCHA by mollom Spam control
Install the mollom module and enable it.
Go to mollom.com and register your site.Get the public and private keys after
registration.
Enter these keys in administer>>site cofig>> mollom
Mollom.com
Now set the fields that you want mollom spam control to enable.
Remember this adds a small overhead wherever you use it.
Use it only for user registration and user password request forms.
Image galleries
Best option is to create a custom image type using CCK with an imagefield module [drupalmodules.org]
Use taxonomy to tag and organise your images.
Use views to display the images.
Image galleries – more info Use these modules.
CCK + imagefieldImage cacheViews + views bonus packCustom Pagers
○ allows administrators to define context-sensitive previous/next pagers for any node type.
Lightbox or thickbox
Image gallery – howto 1 After installing modules
Go to image cache admin pages and create image presets. 'Square Thumbnail' – scale to 150 x 150 then crop to 75 x 75 'Display' – scale to 650 x 650
Go to administer content types and create a content type for images. Add an image field type to it.
Go to taxonomy and create a vocabulary and taxonomy to sort your images. Make it required to choose at least one term for your image content type.
Image gallery – howto 2 Go to views and admin>>build>>views
In page settings choose bonus – grid view
In fields section add the title and image fields of your image content type.
On the image field choose 'Do not group multiple values' for 'Handler‘ chose the Imagecache preset size that you want to use for
your gallery images in the 'Option' section. If you installed the Thickbox module, you should see an
option called 'Thickbox: Square_Thumbnail
Image gallery – howto 3 In the Filters section choose
Node Published = YesYou can also filter by taxonomy here to show
images with a particular term. If you wish.Choose taxonomy term and give required settings.you can create one gallery view and 'expose' the
taxonomy filter [button on side] so people can choose what gallery to look at.
Check use AJAX in basic settings for changes w/o page reload.
Image gallery – final tweaks So at this point, if you have created some CCK
image nodes, you should see a gallery at the page you’ve created. Give it a name and a menu block and check it out. Remember to save first though.
Go into administer>>'Custom pagers' Click 'Add a new custom pager'. Most of the settings
will be obvious, but these are two key ones:Node Type = Image (or again whatever you called you
CCK image content type) In the "Use a view" section, pick the name of your
gallery view.
SWF tools SWF Tools allows you to easily embed flash
content on your pages. use CCK filefields.or use an input filter with [swf
file="mymovie.swf"]or use PHP and call print swf('mymovie.swf');[swf file="myAudio.mp3"] or [swf
file="myVideo.flv"]. Will create a video player automatically..
Remember to go to admnister>>input formats and enable swftools there.
Jquery In versions prior to Drupal 5.0, javascript
effects are made possible through a decent library of functions in /misc/drupal.js.
One limitation of drupal.js was the fact that its development would never match the pace of dedicated javascript libraries.
The AJAX developers group began looking for agreement about which library should be used.
jQuery was identified as the best candidate. Its also under GPL and bundeled with drupal.
Benefits of jquery
The core jQuery library is very small (about 15kb).
jQuery has a clean, modular approach to plugins.
The core library is stable, being in perpetual feature freeze from version 1.0.
Jquery – javascript teqniques
<?php
drupal_add_js (
'$(document).ready(function(){$("p.jtest").fadeIn(6000);}); ',
'inline');
?>
<p class="jtest" style=“width: 30em;display:none;">
This is an example of an effect which is built into the core jQuery
library. This text should fade in after the DOM is loaded. <a
href="http://api.drupal.org/api/HEAD/function/drupal_add_js">
drupal_add_js()</a> was used to add the <a href="http://jquery.com/api/"> fadeIn</a> effect to any paragraph with the class <b>jtest</b>.
</p>
Add this content to a page with the php input filter turned on.
Panels The Panels module allows a site administrator
to create customized layouts for multiple uses.
it is a drag and drop content manager that lets you visually design a layout and place content within that layout.
Integration with other systems allows you to customize the layout of your site with very fine grained permissions
Panels && more views
Install the panels and the ctools module.
Go to administer>>views. Under default view list, find front page and archive views and click on enable for both of them.
Go to administer>>panels. Then to settings/panel pages..Check everything in new content behaviour.
Panels - 1
Go to dashboard in administer>>panels. Create new panel page.
Admin title – HomePath to frontCheck make home page.Click continue.
Choose flexible layout.
Panels 2 – the design
Click show layout designer. Click on the lowermost region, change
name from center to “Left”. Now, click on rows, just above it and
select add region to right. Name it “Right”.
Move the slider bar to give a 80/20 shift. Click finish.
Panels 3 – …
Click on the menu tab on the left. Normal menu tab.Set the Weight to: -10 Title to 'Home'.
Click update and save.
Panels 3 – adding content
Now go to the content tab.Click on gear icon in left pane and choose
add content.Choose views, frontpage [created earlier]
and choose page.Check 'Link title to view'.Check 'Provide a "more" link that links to the
view'. Click 'Finish' at the bottom.Update and save.
Panels 4 – more and more On the right pane, click gear icon under activity select who’s new. Click on gear again and select who’s online
under activity. Click on gear again and select archives
under views. Use block display.Link title to view and click finish.
Click finish and save. Check your front page out. Disable all blocks on frontpage.
Robots.txt
Check robots.txt in your drupal root. When using pathatuo, add following line
Disallow: /node/ Else, search engines will discover
duplicate over a period of time, and some users have reported a penalization for duplicate content. However, Google states that there is no penalty.
Gmap location module
Using a google maps module to acces the gmaps API.
Get the free google maps api key. [google it]
Creates a single Google Maps page (at http://yoursite.com/gmaplocation), designed to display one location for the site, with an address marker.* The map location is automatically geocoded from a street address.
Community – social networking
Organic groups module allows you to create “groups” and assign users to choose a particular group.
users post content with visibility restricted to their group, a kind of private group chat or discussion.
A group has its own administrator & users can subscribe to a group or be invited to join group.
OG module has many ancilliary modules that will allow multiple abilities on your website.
Other modules for Social n/w Blocks for OG Private Forums for OG Activity Buddy list – lets your users have
friends.. Friend module User invite User relationships
Facebook connect (!beta) This module allows users to login on a Drupal
website through the Facebook Connect API – using their Facebook login and password.
The module also brings other extra features:Users can see which of their Facebook friends already
have an account on the Drupal websiteUsers can publish a customizable message on their
Facebook feed announcing that they have created an account on the Drupal website
Users can invite their Facebook friends to create an account on the Drupal website
To use facebook connect Download the Facebook PHP libraries from
http://svn.facebook.com/svnroot/platform/clients/packages/facebook-platform.tar.gz.
Copy the content of the "php" folder into the "facebook-client" folder,
Create a new application on fb: name it your site’s name http://www.facebook.com/developers/createapp.php
Configure the module through the 'Fbconnect' section of the 'Site configuration' menu,
use the information provided by Facebook (API key, Secret API key).
When editing configuration, make sure your facebook session's is active
WSIWYG editor
http://drupal.org/project/wysiwyg WSIWYG is in alpha now. It should be in beta in a couple of weeks. Wysiwyg module allows you to use
client-side editors (a.k.a. WYSIWYG editors) to edit content in Drupal. It simplifies installation and integration of editors and allows to assign an editor to each input format.
Ubercart for commerce solutions Ubercart is an e-commerce suite
developed for Drupal. It has been designed with the end user
in mind, focusing on usability in three key areas: store configuration, product and catalog creationorder administration.
Backup and migrate module
Allows you to take periodic backups of your SQL database only.
It will retrieve your SQL database.
You can use it to migrate site from a test installation to a live one.