Book Image

Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

As social networks become more popular, their role in the classroom has come under scrutiny. Drupal offers a wide variety of useful tools for educators. Within a single Drupal site, you can set up social bookmarking, podcasting, video hosting, formal and informal groups, rich user profiles, and other features commonly associated with social web communities. "Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition" teaches you how to create your own social networking site to advance teaching and learning goals in the classroom, while giving you complete control over features and access. Communicate with students, share learning resources, and track assignments through simple tasks with this hands-on guide.In this book you will learn to install and configure the default Drupal distribution and then extend it to include blogs, bookmarks, a media sharing platform, and discussion forums. The book also covers how to organize your site to easily track student work on the site, and how to control who has access to that information. Additionally, it teaches you how to make the site easy to use, how to maintain the site, and how to ask for and receive help in the Drupal community.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Installing modules and themes


As you run and administer your Drupal site, you will need to install and enable different contributed modules and themes. To understand how to install contributed modules and themes, we will need to take a brief look at the Drupal's directory structure, as pictured in the following screenshot:

As seen in the preceding screenshot, the directory structure contains seven directories, in addition to 20 files in the base folder of the Drupal installation.

Files

On looking at the files in the base folder of the Drupal installation, we will see three different types of files: an .htaccess file, a series of .txt files, and a series of .php files. The .htaccess file contains specific settings that help ensure that your site runs smoothly; the .txt files (with the exception of robots.txt) contain all the information about Drupal and the .php files are all part of the codebase that allows your site to run.

For most sites, you will never need to open or edit any of these files...