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

Caring for your database


The database containing your site's data is the single most important piece of your site. It contains all of the configuration options you have put into your site, as well as the countless hours of work completed by your students. In short, it needs to be treated with care. Taking care of your database ensures that your site will run smoothly over time.

As you use your site, your database tables will benefit from optimization. This step, although not technically necessary in most cases, can help prevent errors over time. Optimizing tables can be compared to giving a car a tune-up, or with defragmenting a computer's hard drive.

Table optimization can be automated by using the DB Maintenance module, which can be downloaded from http://drupal.org/project/db_maintenance. Download and install this module as described in Chapter 3, Getting Started.

Automating table optimization using DB maintenance

The DB maintenance module provides several options for optimizing your database...