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

Configuring theme compression and caching

Webservers can quickly become overloaded by multiple users requesting pages that require multiple queries. Furthermore, pages that consist of lots of CSS and JavaScript files can reduce the page load time. Both of these issues can be frustrating to the end-user.

In this recipe, we will see how to enable and configure Drupal's caching, which can dramatically reduce the server response time. We will also learn how to activate aggregation of the theme's CSS files, a process that can greatly reduce the number of requests to the server per page load, and vastly improve the page load time for the end-user.

How to do it...

To begin, we will enable and configure Drupal's caching capabilities. We will then enable and configure the optimization options for the theme's CSS and JavaScript files.

  1. 1. Select Configure from the admin menu, then select Performance.

  2. 2. In the CACHING section check the option Cache pages for anonymous users.

  3. 3. Check the option Cache...

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