Drupal Intro
An overview of the architecture, features and
basic site-building workflow of the CMS.
Chris Neglia and Lisa Forgan
Copyright 2009 Page1solutions, LLC
What is Drupal?
• Open Source software written in php.
• A CMS or content-management system.
• A sophisticated web application building tool.
What is a CMS?
• Simply put, a CMS is a website you build using
the website itself.
• Wikipedia definition: A content management system (CMS)
such as a document management system (DMS) is a computer
application used to manage work flow needed to
collaboratively create, edit, review, index, search, publish and
archive various kinds of digital media and electronic text.[1]
What can Drupal be?
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blog
Forum
Online newspaper, Portal / Directory
Brocure site, portfolio, flickr like photo drop
Social community site, job post board
Video site like youtube
Project management site
CRM, ERP, SCM, Wiki
Shopping cart system
E-learning, training site
Dating site
Anything you can think of…
Why use a CMS?
• It helps manage complexity.
• It provides a user interface (UI) for adding,
editing and publishing content.
• It provides a means for collaboration among
many to perform the above tasks.
Why use Drupal over Wordpress?
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Wordpress was designed only to be a blog with some easy add-ons.
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Drupal was designed to be more of a generalist: it’s for making ‘anything’ and is far
more robust.
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Wordpress could be the better choice for blogs since it is better at being a blog than
Drupal. This is something of debate.
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Wordpress is still a sound choice of CMS for SEO and security; so if wordpress satisfies a
simpler project’s requirements then by all means use it- it is easier and faster to set up
than Drupal.
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Wordpress is not designed to be highly scalable to many simultaneous users, nor does it
have flexible roles, permissions, extensible content types, nor does it have plentiful
well-tested, quality add-ons. It has a few and a lot of really poor plugins.
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Caveat: Trying to force Wordpress to do something it cannot do easily with very popular
plug-ins can be worse than suffering the learning curve of Drupal.
Why use Drupal over Joomla? (or other CMS)
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It has superior session handling for a CMS.
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It has superior security.
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It is a more consistent, reliable and flexible framework for development.
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It is considered better for SEO from our research.
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It uses a ‘separation of concerns’ architecture to cleanly and consistently separate
structure, function, form, and presentation in layers (ie: php from data as db/xml,
layout and presentation as html and css).
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It heavily uses ‘defaults overrides’ in code in the form of hooks and in themes in
the form of templates. This makes it extremely flexible.
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Other CMS’es do a very very bad job of at least one of the above.
Downsides to the Druup
• Drupal has a steeper learning curve than
wordpress or Joomla.
• Drupal and it’s developers make no excuse for
this fact- it is a robust, flexible tool
• That said, the drupal community is constantly
addressing usability and user-experience issues
because they want the industry market share.
What is a UI?
• UI is a user-interface, which is a general term
for the layout of options, widgets and settings
used to configure the system or manage
content.
• ‘Site-building’ activities refer to configuring
settings or managing content through the UI,
such as building navigation menus.
Drupal Structure
• Drupal is a database-driven (‘dynamic’)
application. It requires a database.
• Drupal has a core filesystem whose
functionality can be extended using the UI
itself, modules and themes.
• The UI settings are stored in the database.
Modules
• Packages of files in a directory that you upload
into drupal’s module space (/sites/all/modules)
• Add functionality to drupal
• ‘Core’ Modules come shipped with drupal
• ‘Contributed’ Modules are downloads from
drupal.org
Themes
• Packages of files in a directory that you upload
into drupal’s theme space (/sites/all/themes)
• Themes adjust the site layout and style. Like
‘skinning’ your media player.
• Themes can be easily changed in the UI.
Drupal Database
Drupal’s database tracks things like :
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Site and Module settings,
User’s information,
Access information,
Logging information,
Permissions and User Roles,
System Paths
Content and content metadata
Nodes
• A node is the primary form of content in a
drupal site. At a minimum it is a title and a
body, and can be ‘specialized’.
• A ‘page’ and ‘story’ for example are node
types that have a specific node settings.
• A node type is a blueprint for creating
instances of content of a particular type.
Nodes (cont)
• Not everything in Drupal is a node.
• This is important!!
• Ex: A user is not a node. A taxonomy is not a
node. An account is not a node.
• Knowing this is important for evaluation of
what can and cannot be easily done through
the UI, without additional programming.
Layout and Regions
• A Region is an area in a layout, such as a header, footer,
content, left/right sidebar into which blocks can be
placed and arranged.
• A block is a box containing some information
• A node resides only in the content area of the layout
(except in special circumstances).
• Think of the content region as a big ‘node’ block that
allows other blocks in it but the node itself can’t move.
Blocks
• Blocks are added by modules.
• Blocks can contain views, widgets, menus,
nodes (in special circumstances), and panels.
• Blocks can be moved around through the UI
• Blocks can be styled individually.
Additional Terminology
• Views – an interface for making customized
lists of the data contained in the drupal
database.
• Panels – an interface for making customized
layouts of nodes available to the panels
module.
• Widgets – a general term for interactive form
elements or graphs that are enabled by
modules.
Admin Menu
• The administrative menu is a part of the UI
that allows one to configure Drupal’s settings.
• The settings available depend on which
modules are installed and enabled.
• Permissions allow users to have
‘administrative’ access to module settings.
Users
• All CMSes (wordpress, Joomla, Drupal) have a
user login system; users have a username/pw.
• Drupal also supports the concepts of 1) Roles
and 2) Permissions.
• Roles are user designations to groups having
the same set of permissions.
Anonymous User
• A (not-logged-in) site visitor is called a ‘guest’,
‘visitor’ or ‘anonymous user’.
• Has a user-id (uid) of 0 (zero).
• All anonymous users belong to the
‘anonymous user role’ (a role ID of 1) and
have a set of permissions assigned to them.
Authenticated User
• A user in drupal may belong to one or more
roles.
• Every registered user in Drupal belongs to at
least the ‘authenticated user’ role.
• Authenticated user role has a role ID of 2
Root ‘Admin’ User
• The ‘root’ user or ‘root admin’ has the ability
to do anything on the site and is a special user.
• The ‘root’ user has a user-id (uid) of 1.
• The ‘root’ user does NOT have rolepermissions to set because they are effectively
gods within Drupal.
Managing Permissions
• KEY concept: if you grant permission to an
authenticated user, it applies to ALL roles
except the anonymous user.
• To grant a permission to everyone on a site,
you must grant the permission to both the
anonymous user and authenticated user.
Managing Permissions
• To grant permission to only a newly created
‘dentist role’, tick the permission on that role.
• Leave all the other roles deselected.
• If you grant to both the ‘dentist role’ AND the
‘authenticated user’ role, you would be doing
it wrong. Drupal assumes you know this.
Recipe: Change Site Information
• In Administer > Site Configuration > Site
Information:
• Change the information to suit your site
following the help text.
• Don’t change the ‘Default front page’ just yet.
• Click ‘Save configuration’
Recipe: Change Date and Time
• In Administer > Site Configuration > Date and
Time:
• Change the timezone to the correct time for
America/Denver (-0600 UTC)
• Change the time formats
• Click ‘Save Configuration’
Recipe: Clean Urls
Clean URLs remove the ?q= from the location
bar in your web browser.
• In Administer > Site Configuration > Clean
Urls:
• Tick ‘Enabled’
• Click ‘Save Configuration’
Clean Urls Issue
• If ‘Clean URLs’ is an unchangeable option,
then there is a misconfiguration of the drupal
site hosting environment.
• Contact your local IT support for assistance or
consult the drupal handbook for more info.
• For the purposes of this demo, it’s not
important but it -is- important to enable later.
Recipe: Add a user
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Go to Administer > User Management > Users
Click ‘Add user’
Choose options.
Click ‘Create New Account’
Recipe: Add a user
• A user can also add themselves by registering, if
the root user has allowed this option.
• Go to Administer > User Management > User
Settings
• Tick ‘Visitors can create accounts and no
administrator approval is required’
• Click ‘Save Configuration’
Recipe: Add Roles
• You will note that ‘anonymous’ and
‘authenticated’ users are there by default,
undeletable.
• Type in the box below the roles in the ‘Name’
column. Click ‘add role’. That’s it.
Recipe: Edit / Delete role
• Click ‘edit’ next to the role name.
• Here you can change the name or delete the
role.
• Warning: If you click ‘delete role’, there is NO
confirmation. This can be bad.
Recipe: Assign multiple roles to User
• In Administer > User Management > Users:
• Click the ‘edit’ link under operations for a user
• Under Roles, Tick an additional role you
created.
• You will notice ‘authenticated user’ is locked.
• Scroll to the bottom and click ‘Save’
Recipe: Altering Permissions
• Under Administer > User Management > Permissions: you will see
there is a permissions column and role columns.
• Scroll down to the user module section.
• Tick ‘change own username’ in the ‘authenticated user’ column.
• Tick ‘Save Permissions’
Recipe: Build Menu
• Under Administer > Site Building > Menus:
• Click Primary Links
• On the Primary Links ‘List Items’ page, click ‘Add Item’
• In Path, type ‘contact’. In Menu link title, type ‘Contact Form’.
• Change weight to ‘50’ (drupal 6.x; ‘10’ in drupal 5.x)
• Click Save.
• You will notice that ‘Contact Form’ appears now on the far right of your
primary links. Click it to go to the contact form.
Recipe: Create About Page
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In the Navigation (left sidebar), click ‘Create Content’
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Click ‘Page’ under the content type listing.
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In the Title, type ‘About Us’. In the body type ‘This is my first drupal page’.
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Expand the ‘Menu settings’ fieldset.
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In the “Menu link title” type ‘About Us’.
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Change the weight to ‘49’.
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Expand the ‘URL path’ fieldset and type ‘about-us’
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Click ‘Save’
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You should now see the ‘About Us’ menu item in the Primary Link navigation. Click it to go to this
newly created node.
Recipe: Get modules
• Default Drupal installs can only do so much.
• Go to http://drupalmodules.com to find a module that
supports what you are trying to do.
• Do rely on the ratings here as they are tied to download /
popularity metrics from http://drupal.org
Recipe : Change Site (Admin) Email
• Note: There are multiple places to change the email address for a
site ‘root user’ administrator. You may have to dig around for
them in admin menu when logged in as the root user. Get login
info from Salesforce.
• In site information : admin/settings/site-information
• Site-wide contact form settings : admin/build/contact (edit
operation)
• Mass contact settings (if used) : admin/build/mass_contact/settings
• Mail settings (different places, ex uses mimemail) :
admin/settings/mimemail
• User register notify : admin/settings/register_notify
Recipe: Halp! The site is messed up
• If the login disappears and you can’t login, go to
www.yourdomain.com/user or
www.yourdomain.com/index.php?q=user
• If clean URLs is not working, substitute the first forward slash
(‘/’) after the domain/host with ‘/index.php?q=‘ without the
quotes.
• If all else fails, call Chris or Alex to build a GUI interface in
Visual Basic to track down the perpetrator in realtime.
Installing Modules
• Download (from drupal.or) and Unpack module ‘tarballs’
(*.tar.gz) files to the folder inside.
• Upload the module folder to <drupal_root>
/sites/all/modules.
• Create the ‘modules’ and ‘themes’ directories if they are
not there.
• Go to Administer > Site Building > Modules : and tick
‘Enabled’ next to the module to enable it and click ‘Save
Configuration’
Using Modules
• A newly enabled module will add an
administration menu.
• Go to that module and read the help before
changing anything.
• Play around and learn it’s feature set.
• Install the ‘Advanced Help’ module to get more
verbose help with modules.
Modules Used on Almost every Drupal Site
Administration
menu
CCK
Views
String Overrides
Backup and Migrate
Panels + ctools +
delegator
Token
Actions
Triggers
Notify
Poormanscron
Webform
Date + Date API
Messaging,
Messaging API
Mime Module &
messaging-phpmailer
SEO Checklist
SEO Compliance
Checker
Pathauto
Path Redirect
Global Redirect
Search404
Meta Tags
Global GEOurl
Html Purifier
Page Titles
Printer-friendly pages
XML Sitemap
Site Map
Taxonomy Manager
Scheduler
Captcha &
Mollum || Spam
Wysiwyg-api, imce
FCKeditor | TinyMCE
ImageAPI &
ImageCache
Google Analytics
Menu Attributes
Addthis || Diggthis
Sharethis
Auto Assign Role
(+patch)
Guestbook
Simplenews
Ubercart
Most Useful Contributed Modules
Administration
menu
CCK
Views
String Overrides
Backup and
Migrate
SEO Checklist
SEO Compliance
Checker
Pathauto
Path Redirect
Global Redirect
Search404
Meta Tags
Global GEOurl
Html Purifier
Page Title
Menu Attributes
New XML Sitemap
Site Map
Taxonomy Manager
Token
Auto Assign Role
(+patch)
Ubercart
Date
Mollum / Spam
Captcha
WYSIWYG API
FCKEditor
IMCE
Chaos Tools +
Delegator
Panels
Actions
Triggers
Notify
Scheduler
Guestbook
Simplenews
Addthis / Diggthis/
Sharethis
GoogAnalytics
Most Useful Contributed Modules for SEO
SEO Checklist
SEO Compliance
Checker
Path + Pathauto
Path Redirect
Search404
Meta Tags
Global GEOurl
Html Purifier
Menu Attributes
New XML Sitemap
Site Map
Advanced: Open
Calais –RDF
metadata WS
Global Redirect
Page Title
Most Useful Contributed Modules (OLD)
Administration
menu
CCK
Views
String Overrides
Backup and Migrate
SEO Checklist
SEO Compliance
Checker
Pathauto
Path Redirect
Global Redirect
Search404
Meta Tags
Global GEOurl
Html Purifier
Page Title
Menu Attributes
New XML Sitemap
Site Map
Taxonomy Manager
Token
Auto Assign Role
(+patch)
Ubercart
Mollum / Spam
Captcha
WYSIWYG API
FCKEditor
IMCE
Actions
Triggers
Notify
Date
Addthis / Diggthis/
Sharethis
Advanced:
Advanced: Apache
Solr Search (we
cannot support yet)
Scheduler
Chaos Tools +
Delegator
Panels
Guestbook
Simplenews
GoogAnalytics
Advanced: Open
Calais –RDF metadata
WS
Advanced: Devel
(danger)
Advanced: PHPmailer
/
SMTP Auth
A warning about using Free and Low
Cost (downloaded) Themes
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They are more difficult to customize than starting from scratch, but faster to use.
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Some of the markup is not seo-friendly.
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Some of the markup is over-engineered and messy; less is more.
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Free or amateur / low-cost themes can be confusing if you look at the code; this may
impair your ability to learn drupal theming.
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Some of the markup may be in tables or liquid layout and this may be hard to change
for your particular project, even if it looks nice to you.
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Best practice suggests you either find a theme design and mimic its look-and-feel or do
the traditional photoshop mock up.
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If you take someone else’s theme, you don’t know what you’re going to get and this can
hinder your ability to develop
Getting free themes
• http://themegarden.org/drupal6/
• http://drupal.org/project/Themes
• http://themebot.com/free-website-templates/drupal-themes
• Google ‘drupal themes’ you’ll find a bunch of
stuff. Buyer beware.
Most Useful Themes
Zen
(use starter kit to subtheme)
960 grid based themes
Garland
(use as admin theme)
Blarland… an evil copy of
garland. Place it in
sites/all/themes and
change the name of garland
to blarland in folder, and
file names esp in the info
file.