Drupal Basics

Drupal Basics
May 30, 2012
By Sean Fitzpatrick

Welcome

We're going to talk about Drupal

We're going to keep it pretty basic

You should leave with enough curiosity to experiment
on your own

This is not a Drupal vs. Wordpress smackdown, but
we will be making some comparisons

Sean Fitzpatrick | sean@lishost.org

Introductions

Who am I?

What is LISHost?

What do we do?


Scope of the workshop

We're going to try to cover the basics

I am assuming most of you are beginners

If you are a total beginner, I apologize for going
fast and using technical terms

If you are not a total beginner, I apologize for
going slow and using basic terms


What is Drupal?
And why is it awesome for library sites?

Open source content management framework

“Allows you to create and maintain many different
types of websites without needing to know any coding
languages” – http://drupal.org/node/258

No prescribed configurations, but many features
common to library sites are easily available in Drupal


Why Drupal?
Lots of stuff available for typical library sites:

News Feeds

Calendar

Taxonomies

Image handling (such as galleries)

Search

Comments and other social functionality


Drupal 6 or Drupal 7?
It's a shame I even put this slide in here. Just use
Drupal 7.


Core, Contrib, and Theme
These three components are the basis of an open
framework for building beautiful bespoke
websites.
Drupal is like a Lego kit. Skilled developers have already
made the building blocks - in the form of contributed
modules - that you need to create a site that suits your
needs, whether that is a news site, an online store, a social
network, blog, wiki, or something else altogether.
From http://drupal.org/getting-started/before/overview


Drupal core

Talks to the database (so you don't have to)

Provides some basic functionality for organizing
content

Builds content into web pages

Gives some basic options for a front end (theme)

(i.e, Drupal core gives you a basic, dynamic website)


Contributed modules

Thousands of modules extend Drupal's core

This makes anything possible. (“There's a module for
that...”)

Modules have already done all the “heavy lifting”

And all this comes with benefits and challenges


Theme

Theme layer presents content and markup to the browser

Rendered with PHP

And HTML, JS, CSS, etc

Drupal offers lots of template files and overrides


Good and Bad

Ultimate flexibility

Future extendability

Scalability
vs

Learning Curve

Staff time


Learning curve?
I believe the “learning curve” inexperienced
people associate with Drupal pertains to site
building and back-end development. This is
irrelevant for day-to-day content managers.


Technology stack

Web Server: Apache or Microsoft IIS

PHP: 5.2 or higher

Database Server: MySQL - 5.0 or higher, PostgreSQL
- 8.3 or higher, or SQLite (Microsoft SQL Server and
Oracle are supported by an additional module)


Personnel and skill sets

Project manager

Information designer

Copywriters (don't tell me you're going to migrate...)

Web designer

Developer – could be two – front- and back-end

IT/Systems guy


Let's stop for some questions


Installation

From scratch...

provision server

Install apache, mysql, php, some other packages

Installing Drush is a good idea for command line people

Download Drupal

Set directory permissions

Create a database

Run the installation script


Post install: Dream big, code little

Installing Drupal is pretty trivial. Then the real work
starts.

By selecting great contributed modules and learning
how to implement them, you can achieve amazing
functionality without any programming.

Similarly, some themes offer a lot of robust
configuration options for creating beautiful sites
without writing any code.


Content types and Views

Content types are extended with custom fields.

Fields store data in the database. Lots of data types
are available, such as dates, files, location
coordinates, and so forth.

The Views module (contrib) is a tool set for building
complex queries with a graphical UI (no coding).


API and theme libraries

You can go a long way without programming, but big,
complex sites need custom development.

Drupal offers a rich API for extending functionality.

Similarly, base themes and theme functions allow for
implementing any kind of front-end design.


Buzzword compliance

HTML5, CSS3

Mobile-first

Responsive design

SASS/Compass

Etc.
(I pretty much only follow buzzwords from the front-end dev world)


Third-party content

Drupal has some amazing tools for integrating third-
party content (try the Feeds module)

RSS, XML, CSV, SQL

Evanced

ILS

???


Users and Workflows

Custom user roles/permissions by module (no pre-
defined roles to limit flexibility)

Simple publishing and editing for small institutions.

Ability to create complex workflows to scale up for
large institutions. (Check out the Rules module.)


Security

Yes, sites get hacked.

Keep modules up-to-date (especially security
updates).

Keep other stuff up-to-date.

Be careful about permissions.

Keep track of users, logs, spam, etc.


Scalability

Oh yeah, some big library sites too.


Additional Resources

drupal.org/documentation

groups.drupal.org

api.drupal.org

Drupal4Lib
(http://listserv.uic.edu/archives/drupal4lib.html)

#drupal (irc)

info@lishost.org

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