Book Image

Drupal 8 Quick Start Guide

By : J. Ayen Green
Book Image

Drupal 8 Quick Start Guide

By: J. Ayen Green

Overview of this book

Drupal is a powerful content management platform, ?exible enough to accommodate almost any content requirements. This ?exibility comes with a cost: complexity. Drupal 8 Quick Start Guide will clear your path from installation to a building usable site in minutes, and to a customized site in one sitting. You will begin with installation of Drupal and going through the main sections of the Drupal UI. Then, you will create a content type that describes its content, which simplifies the act of creating and editing the actual content later. You will learn about user roles, using real-world examples. This will help you to learn how to design roles, and how to assign appropriate permissions to them. Next, you will learn to use the WYSIWYG editor, configure it for other roles, navigate the various fields on the content creation form, and publish content. To begin to appreciate the ?exibility and expandability of Drupal, you will make use of popular content-focused modules that extend Drupal's power. You will learn how to expand your market to other readers directly and through other sites by configuring content and UI translations and creating a View that provides an RSS feed. Finally, you will put everything together by customizing the home page for your new website.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Creating the Feed Links block


Our feeds won't be of much use if site visitors can't find them, so we will create a means for them to do so. We're not going to be using Views for this. You might wonder why, since Views can create a block display. Views is made to select items (rows of data) and create an output for each, whether that be feed items, pages of articles, or a bulleted list. Our links are going to be HTML text unrelated to rows. In other words, this is one block of text without any regard to a selection of article content or any other content. Because of that, the easiest approach is to create a custom block to act as a feed menu on the home page, like so:

  1. Navigate to Structure | Block layout (/admin/structure/block) and click the tab for Custom block library. Then, click the +Add custom block button.
  2. For the Block description, enter RSS feeds.
  3. For the Body, click Source in the toolbar, and then enter the following:
<a href="/pets/feed">Pets</a><br />
<a href...