Online Drupal Training Syllabus

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Online Drupal Training Syllabus

What is Drupal?
 Open Source software written in php.
 A CMS or content-management system.
 A sophisticated web application building tool.

What can Drupal be?
• 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

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?
• Wordpress was designed only to be a blog with some easy add-ons.
• Drupal was designed to be more of a generalist: it’s for making
‘anything’ and is far more robust.
• Wordpress could be the better choice for blogs since it is better at being
a blog than Drupal. This is something of debate.
• 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.

Why use Drupal over Joomla? (or other CMS)
• It has superior session handling for a CMS.
• It has superior security.
• It is a more consistent, reliable and flexible framework for development.
• It is considered better for SEO from our research.
• 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).

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 :
• 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).

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.

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.

Online Drupal Training Syllabus

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Online Drupal Training Syllabus