Book Image

Drupal 7 Cookbook

By : Dylan Spencer James
Book Image

Drupal 7 Cookbook

By: Dylan Spencer James

Overview of this book

<p>Drupal 7 is a modern Content Management System famed for its flexibility and power. Using Drupal you can easily create custom functionality that would otherwise have to be purchased in many of the other leading CMSs.<br /><br />"Drupal 7 Cookbook" is filled with recipes to help you to do more with Drupal and improve your skills. Chapters range from content creation, to theming, to managing your site. You will learn how to create your own content types and use them to create Views, Blocks, and Pages. This book will take you from novice to pro in just 12 chapters.<br /><br />In a wide variety of practical recipes, you will learn how to work with views and panels, how to provide translations for your content to create a multilingual site, and to integrate your site with social media. You can develop the Zen starter theme or learn how to create custom cross-browser compatible Drupal themes, including themes for mobile devices. The Drupal 7 Cookbook contains all of the means necessary to take your skills from those of a novice Drupal user to a proficient site builder.</p>

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Drupal 7 Cookbook
Dylan Spencer James
Jul, 2012 | 324 pages
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Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Drupal 7 Cookbook
Drupal 7 Cookbook
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Installing and Configuring Drupal
Installing and Configuring Drupal
Introduction
Installing Drupal
Installing Drupal distributions
Installing modules and themes
Setting up site search
Creating a multi-site Drupal installation
2
Creating and Publishing Content
Creating and Publishing Content
Introduction
Creating a basic page and adding it to the main menu
Installing and configuring a WYSIWYG editor
Editing existing content and adding an image
Adjusting the tabbed settings for content nodes
Configuring comments
Publishing an RSS feed of basic pages
3
Working with Blocks
Working with Blocks
Introduction
Adding a new block
Creating a submenu block
Creating a Superfish menu block
Creating a block with Views
Adding a new block region to a theme
Creating a mega-footer menu
Conditional display of a block
4
Custom Content Types
Custom Content Types
Introduction
Creating a basic content type
Configuring the output of a content type
Applying an image format
Installing more field types
Creating a more advanced content type
Building a custom content importer
Building a forum
5
Using Views to Create Custom Lists, Grids, and Tables
Using Views to Create Custom Lists, Grids, and Tables
Introduction
Creating a news listing view
Creating a dynamic view
Creating a latest news block
Creating a news image grid view
Creating a randomly selected list of images
Creating an archived content block and view
Building complex views using relationships
Adding a text search filter to a view
Using attachments to extend Views' output
6
Creating Flexible Pages Using Panels
Creating Flexible Pages Using Panels
Introduction
Adding custom text to a page
Adding a block to a page
Adding a dynamic view to a page
Configuring the visibility of the page
Creating a custom page layout using the Layout builder
7
Working with Media
Working with Media
Introduction
Creating a simple slideshow carousel
Creating a document content type
Creating a simple document library
Linking documents to a content type
Adding video to a content type
8
Integrating Web APIs
Integrating Web APIs
Introduction
Integrating with Facebook
Displaying a live Twitter feed
Adding simple PayPal integration to content types
Setting up the Add this social bookmarking service
Adding a Google Map to content
9
Creating Regular, Mobile, and Tablet Themes
Creating Regular, Mobile, and Tablet Themes
Introduction
Creating a new theme using Zen
Overriding HTML output of a content type
Creating a "bare-bones" theme from scratch
Using the Mobile tools module
Installing an off-the-shelf mobile and tablet theme
Configuring theme compression and caching
10
Working with Other Languages
Working with Other Languages
Introduction
Installing another language using Locale
Managing interface translation using Locale
Enabling content type translation
Displaying a language switching block for end users
Creating a multilingual View
11
Managing Users
Managing Users
Introduction
Creating new user accounts
Managing user roles
Setting up a new user notification
Adding a biography field to the user profile
Building a grid view of profile pictures
12
Running Drupal
Running Drupal
Introduction
System maintenance
Setting up a backup system
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with Drupal
Securing a Drupal installation
Configuring Drupal caching
Running commands with the Drush tool

Installing modules and themes

It is entirely possible to run a very successful Drupal website out of the box without adding any third-party modules. However, this approach is limited, and your needs may grow out of the built-in core functionalities. With just a few additional modules, the functionality of your site can be significantly expanded.

In this recipe, we will first see how to install the Link module from the Drupal.org website, followed by how to activate and configure it. The Link module adds a Link field to the list of available fields that can be used to create new content types.

How to do it...

  1. 1. Go to http://drupal.org/project/link.

  2. 2. Examine the available releases of Link, and find the most recent Drupal 7 release; copy the URL for the tar.gz file.

  3. 3. In Drupal, select Modules from the admin menu, followed by Install new module.

  4. 4. Paste the URL into the Install from a URL field and click on Install.

  5. 5. After the module is installed, select Enable newly added modules.

  6. 6. Look through the list of installed modules for the FIELDS fieldset. Select the checkbox for Link.

  7. 7. Click on Save configuration to finish:

How it works...

We begin by going to the project page for the module we are installing. In this case, the Link module. We then look for the most recent recommended release of the module.

Note

On the module's page it is likely that there will be two releases for both the Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 versions of the module. The files with the green background are the recommended releases. Be sure to use this version wherever possible. Sometimes there will only be an alpha or development release; try to get the highest version number.

After copying the link to the module's file, we go to the module installation page, and paste the URL to the module's file, and click on Install. Drupal then copies the file to the server, and extracts it into its own directory in the modules folder of the site.

After the module has been copied, we go back to the modules list, and enable the newly installed module by checking its checkbox and clicking on Save configuration to finish.

There's more...

There are more ways to install modules in Drupal. It's up to you to decide which method you prefer, but some other methods are described in the following sections.

Manually installing a module

The preceding method described uses the install from URL method. You may want to install a module manually. In which case simply download and extract the module package and move the extracted files to the Drupal root/sites/all/modules directory.

Installing a module with the Drush command-line tool

The process of installing modules can be made even easier by using the Drush tool to issue installation commands.

See also

  • Running commands with the Drush tool recipe in Chapter 12, Running Drupal

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