introduction into drupal site building

Introduction into Drupal site building

Iztok Smolič, Drupal camp Alpe-Adria, Ljubljana 2013

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‣ Started as graphic designer(before we called ourself UX, IA, etc designers)

‣ Drupal developer from Drupal 6

‣ Working as a independent consultant, and running Drupal dev team AGILEDROP.

‣ Organized meetups in Ljubljana, co-founded Drupal Slovenia Association, co-organizing this camp.

Twitter:@iztok

Skype:iztok.smolic

Email:iztok@agiledrop.com

ABOUT THIS FELLA

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DIGG IN AND START BUILDING?

THINK AGAIN.

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SERVER/HOSTING

‣ System requirementsApache, Nginx, or Microsoft IISMySQL 5.0.15+, PostgreSQL 8.3+, SQLite 3.3.7+PHP 5.3Any popular hosting service should do. Important: Try to get PHP's memory_limit 64MB or more.

‣ Access to the server (SSH, SFTP, FTP) to manage web server’s files.

★If you have SSH access to the server and you are hardcore checkout Drush, thank me latter...

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RESEARCH.

“Though no one can go back and make a brand-new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand-new ending.” ― Carl Bard

‣ The practices you get on your first project are hard to forget.

‣ Using concepts from other CMS or framework is usually a bad idea.

Learn from resources like drupalize.me or buildamodule.com. Official documentation is usually not rookie friendly.

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RESEARCH.

‣ If its your first project be ready to rebuild it from ground up over and over again.

‣ Use IRC to quickly crowd source the architectural solution. (drupal.org/irc)

‣ Don’t look for a module, look for a solution.In Drupal you don’t get a module for a feature, you can get modules to build your feature.

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INSTALLING EXTENSIONS

There is no words to describe how important the following instructions are...

‣ When installing extra modules or themes put them in:

‣ sites/all/modules/contrib/[all your modules]

‣ sites/all/theme/[all your themes]

‣ Never move, change, edit... (hell, don’t even look at them!) files and folder you got from Drupal.org. This goes to Drupal core, modules and even themes.I can’t haz my files? But how can I change this [put your wish here] to look like I want it to look?

Thursday, August 29, 13

INSTALLING EXTENSIONS

Drupal core

Drupal CoreModules

Drupal Core Themes

Drupal Contributed

Modules

Drupal Contributed

Themes

Custom Drupal (sub)theme

Custom Drupal module with

overrides

Subtheme inherits all template files and CSS from the parent

theme.

We can keep any theme untouched

and so make it upgradable.

Developers are able to hook into module’s

functions to alter how they work.

There is no need to change the original

code in modules. Modules can be

upgraded with no surprises.

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BUILDING BLOCKS

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BUILDING BLOCKS

‣ Content types

‣ Example: Event, Page, Blog, Article, Forum post

‣ Taxonomy vocabularies

‣ Tags, Category, Forums

‣ Users

‣ All of those are fieldable.This is the true power of Drupal.

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BUILDING BLOCKS

‣ With fields we can attach properties to entities

‣ eg: Text, File, Image, Address

‣ With fields like Term reference and Entity reference we link diff entities (tyeps )together.

‣ Try to use fields as much as posible, to keep your data semantic.

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BUILDING BLOCKS EXTRAS

‣ Queries

‣ Views moduleOne and only UI tool for building queries.

‣ Page managing / layoutsI encourage you not to use default Block system.

‣ Context module

‣ Panels module

‣ Logic

‣ Rules module

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THEMING

‣ Never change code in downloaded themes. Instead make your own subtheme: http://drupal.org/node/225125

‣ Don’t use custom page.tpl.php to alter layouts for each subpage (eg page--node-1.tpl.php for “about us”). Use Panels or Context.

‣ Ideally you wont need any extra .tpl files. Trust me.

‣ Love your markup? It took me 2 years to embrace Drupal’s HMTL output...

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LIVE DEMO EXAMPLE

‣ We assume we have installed the following must have modules to your server:

‣ Views (with Ctool as a dependency module)

‣ Panel

‣ Have I mentioned where you need to put them?

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