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

Looking under the hood


Like most Drupal-related things, you have an overwhelmingly broad range of options available to you if you want to tinker with the code that makes your site run. While this holds an incredible amount of appeal to those with a do-it-yourself spirit, it's a bit much for most people.

If, however, you are one of the statistical minority inclined to roll your sleeves up and start messing with such things, this section is for you.

Additionally, the Drupal handbook has an excellent overview of the theming system for Drupal 7 at http://drupal.org/documentation/theme.

Drupal's theme structure

At the outset, I want to make a couple of things clear. First, a detailed analysis of Drupal's theming system is beyond the scope of this book. Second, Drupal offers a lot of flexibility for those who want to mess around with the code; however, just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Additionally, developing a theme is not complete without checking to see how the theme displays in different...