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

The test site


If you want to experiment with Drupal by installing additional modules, a test site provides a safe place to do this. For all of the obvious reasons, your live class site is not the place to experiment or take chances. Although installing a test site is additional work, it provides you with a safe place to learn and experiment without fear of consequences.

Fortunately, the process of verifying your backup, as described in the previous section, also gets you your test site.

The test site is the site that you should use when you are trying something new, from evaluating a new module or theme, to testing an upgrade procedure. Using the test site allows you to take chances you would not otherwise be able to take. For example, if you want to try a new module, you can install it and experiment with the functionality and settings on your test site. If the module does what you need, then you can deploy it on your live site. If, however, the module does not meet your needs, you can just...