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Introduction to Drupal
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- Week 7 - Finale discussion Wed, 2010-11-10 19:35
- Drupal 6 or 7? Tue, 2010-11-09 17:49
- Week 5: Theming Sat, 2010-11-06 02:06
- Today's Session. Thu, 2010-11-04 08:39
- Week 2 - discussion Fri, 2010-10-29 13:06
Week 2 - discussion
We've posted the tasks for this week on Site Building!
View the Week 2 tasks and tutorials here: http://p2pu.org/webcraft/introduction-drupal/document/week-2-tasks
This is an enormous topic, and I wanted to introduce it early because the bulk of all the work you will want to do is Site Building. There seem to be an infinite number of configuration possibilities, and potential pitfalls. This week, I only ask that you tackle these tutorials and grapple with these basics.
Please post your link from your own Web Enabled sandbox here.Indicate which tutorial you attempted.
Ask questions and see if you can "peer to peer" help each other with the activity!
Can you explain (maybe again, if this was already covered - sorry) what a "cron" is? Thanks
A cron job is a program run by your computer on a periodic basis: hourly, daily, weekly, whatever.
WebEnabled has a guide to setting up cron jobs here: http://www.webenabled.com/setting-and-configuring-cron-jobs . The first, longest section is how to get started with PuTTY. This may be useful IF you are using Windows AND you have not used SSH (Secure SHell) before. If you use Mac or Linux, just open a terminal window and use the ssh command.
Drupal uses a cron job to build a site index, check for updates, etc. If you are still confused, it can wait.
Hi everybody. Jill's question reminded me to mention - it would have been nice if all technical and Drupal terminology in the syllabus had links to definitions.
I think this is a great point and should be included in these classes, a glossary perhaps. Maybe we can set thelinks for this as we go(?) What do you think?
With apologies for the very basic nature of my question: I seem to have missed the instructions regarding installing a contributed module- Core modules are easy enough to install, but what do I do with a contributed module?
OK- I see instructions here:
http://drupal.org/getting-started/install-contrib/modules
There is an easier way. WebEnabled comes with drush (DRUpal SHell) pre-installed. Log on using SSH and then try this:
$ drush help
$ drush dl views_bulk_operations
Project views_bulk_operations (6.x-1.9) downloaded to [success]
/home/clients/websites/w_feline/public_html/feline/sites/all/modules/views_bulk_operations.
$ drush en views_bulk_operations
The following projects will be enabled: views_bulk_operations
Do you really want to continue? (y/n): y
views_bulk_operations was enabled successfully.
That is all it took to install Views Bulk Operations (VBO): http://drupal.org/project/views_bulk_operations . Maybe one more thing: I think you have to be in ~/public_html/ or a subdirectory for this to work.
@ Kristen - you can do this using the web environment on Web Enabled:
See this video from Doug:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czIPggnm590
I tried using the drush on webenabled to install ckeditor module for my site. It said it was successfully installed, I've enabled it and set user permissions. However I don't see the editor when I go to edit or create content. Has anyone else installed a wsiwyg editor?
Hi Jill - ckeditor is one of the few modules that requires you to install an additional component for it to work. In this case, the drupal ckeditor module is just a wrapper which allows the integration of the standalone ckeditor into Drupal. It's a good idea to have a look at a module's project page before installing or upgrading it - sometimes it will tell you about requirements like this that drush doesn't enforce. Certain modules also require you to be using a certain version of another module, another good reason to read the project page or release notes. Find out more about ckeditor here.
I think there are some good screencasts out there about installing and configuring a WYSIWYG editor.
In Drupal WYSIWYG is an interface to manage any of your selected libraries. So you can use a variety of options.
Recently, at a DrupalCamp they did a head to head comparison of CKEditor and TinyMCE- and I was surprised to see TinyMCE winning out.
http://www.mediacurrent.com/blogs/wysiwyg-shootout-and-winner
Tutorial on Using TinyMCE:
http://www.alledia.com/blog/drupal-tutorials/adding-a-wysiwyg-editor-to-...
Setting up WYSIWYG http://drupal.org/node/371459
Here's a great video tutorial which brings it all together, showing how to set up inline images in WYSIWYG.
http://himerus.com/blog/himerus/inline-images-drupal-wysiwyg-api-tinymce...
I think Himerus answers quite a number of questions about getting started with WYSIWYG and also image handling. Great tutorial. I hope that helps.
My site for kitten photos is shaping up: http://feline.dev3.webenabled.net/ . I tried the first Intermediate tutorial, using a CCK node reference. Each kitten has a home page, and each image has one or more node reference, linking it to the home page of the kitten. Then the node page for the image pulls information (name, date of birth, maybe some taxonomy terms when I get around to adding them) from the kitten's home page.
The site has some obvious rough spots.
In the long run, I think I am more likely to use Views instead of editing node-.tpl.php as in the tutorial.
Updating Modules
I looked at the modules included with the Acquia Drupal installation and enabled several of them. I got a warning: several modules were out of date, and one that I wanted to use (Lightbox2) had a security update.
Is there any reason not to update all installed modules to the most recent versions? It should be easy enough to do using drush.
Good Question!
You have probably realized that the Acquia Drupal install places a lot of contributed modules into the CORE Modules folder. While this is something we should never do, it does make sense for Acquia to do this since THEY will be issuing the updates for all of those modules.
You are correct that some of the modules that Acquia places in CORE do need to be updated. I can tell you that Acquia would never stand for a security issue with their customers who use Acquia Drupal. Remember some clients are paying thousands of dollars a year for Acquia support subscriptions.
If the security update that you see available is one that you truly feel you need, you can download the module to your sites/all/modules directory which will over-ride the core directory. Once Acquia issues an update and you see that your over ride is no longer needed you can delete the over-rode from all/modules.
If you want to use DRUSH with the ACQUIA install then check out this article.
Let me know if this helps. :-)
- Doug Vann
- http://dougvann.com
- http://twitter.com/dougvann
hi all,
I am working on my localhost. I was able to install contributed modules. I was following this tutorial at
http://geeksandgod.com/tutorials/computers/cms/drupal/creating-simple-li...
In this tutorial, I was able to create the content type but did not know how to assign the datatype. That is from "With our basic link type created, we're now ready to add a Link-type field." Can anyone help me out? Also I could not see the tutorials posted in the tutorials as it was dead slow.
I think what you want to do is click on the "Manage Fields" tab of your content type. This should take you to something like /admin/content/node-type/link/fields if "link" is the "type" of your content type.
You have already enabled the Link module, right?
Hi all,
I have setup some news feeds - the only one i can't get to work is the Twitter feed.
http://pixelz.dev3.webenabled.net/node/3
Maybe they feeds need a little styling, and to open up the actual source in a new window
All I see when I follow your link is
Maybe anonymous users do not have permission to view your news feeds?
Thanks Benji - forgot to give them permissions. fixed now i think.
I am having problems with the viewing the video on this link http://mustardseedmedia.com/podcast/episode9
all i see is adverts and the actual video doesn't load.
Is anyone else having this problem? or maybe my bandwidth is too slow?
will try again later :(
It's not you, it's Blip.tv. It happensd a lot. I watched the videos 8 hours ago, and no problems. Now I have the same buffering issues you describe. I love Mustardseed Media podcasts. I hate Blip.tv. If you go to the Blip.tv site for a particular video, you can see links to the actual video files on the right hand side border, and copy and past the links into your media player (Quicktime, or something else). That way you can have the video player download the file, and watch it (or save it locally) later when it's fully loaded.
hi! I too had problem with viewing the video on this link
http://mustardseedmedia.com/podcast/episode9 and also the other video was very slow to see and I started reading the tutorial at http://geeksandgod.com/tutorials/computers/cms/drupal/creating-simple-li...
Even in this tutorial, I am stuck up in the middle...
See my comments above to Laura for the Mustardseed Media video problem. The Gotdrupal.com videos and geoffhankerson.com videos seem fine. I also love Gotdrupal.com videos, and have never had any problems viewing them. What I like to do when viewing the Gotdrupal videos is to load the videos into Quicktime, and view them directly in the video player. That way I can better scale the size of the video, or throw it to a second screen so I can follow along as I work on the primary screen. Maybe it will work better for you if you load them into a .mov file videoplayer. After it fully loads, the video will play. And you can save it locally for later replay.
I tried the second Intermediate task, using arguments in a View. Now, the home page for a kitten includes a tab listing all the photos of that kitten. For example, see http://feline.dev3.webenabled.net/node/5/photos .
1. This would probably be easier to accomplish using the image gallery module included in the Acquia Drupal distribution, but the goal here is to get familiar with Views arguments.
2. I should use Pathauto to rewrite the URL so that the Photos tab has a URL consistent with the View tab.
I do have one problem. If I enter the URL with the wildcard, as in http://feline.dev3.webenabled.net/node/all/photos , then I get a list of all the photos, even though I have checked off "Summary, sorted ascending". According to the live preview in Views, the query being executed is
SELECT node.nid AS nid, node.title AS node_title, node.type AS node_type FROM node node WHERE (node.type in ('image')) AND (node.status <> 0 OR (node.uid = ***CURRENT_USER*** AND ***CURRENT_USER*** <> 0) OR ***ADMINISTER_NODES*** = 1)What are the best practices around having lots of modules and throttle?
Throttle is somewhat deprecated– it was taken out of Drupal 7. In general, page and block caching can do the job better than disabling features.
Only enable what you need. Leave the rest disabled, or don't install them. From what I experienced, if you are on shared hosting, the more modules that are ENABLED, the more memory resources will be used, and the chances of getting 500 errors (exceeding memory limit) increase significantly, especially at initial install of Drupal. OpenPublish seemed like a great distribution to start with, but I would never use it on any shared hosting environment. Acquia Drupal can also be a bit bloated; it definetly has many usefull modules, but it can fail install if the shared host doesn't provide enough memory to your account. If you have such issues, just start with drupal core, and add modules that you need one by one. Or get better hosting. Perhaps WebEnabled?
Practice installing modules, and updating them, manually so you understand what happens. Then learn to use Drush. Drush speeds things up, and is great, but it helps to understand what is happening behind the scenes when it runs. The more modules you use, the more security updates and regular updates you have to perform to keep your site secure and functioning correctly.
Thanks for the advice. Any estimate of a range for RAM on shared host like Hostgator?
I knew Tattler wouldn't go because of cron demand but I tried Managing News with them and it crashed then next day.
I am running an instance of ManagingNews on Hostgator. (permaculturenews.info)
I completed task 1, and my news aggregator site is here: http://khmilh.dev2.webenabled.net/ - I just wish I hadn't gotten rid of the login on the front page in the blocks section, now I can't get back in!
We can always get to the login form of a Drupal site at /user :-)
http://khmilh.dev2.webenabled.net/user
Site looks nice!
Thank you for the tip!
OK, finished introductory task 2, here it is: http://kmil.dev2.webenabled.net/
My only hiccup is that you have to first create the Event content type in order to do this task, since in the first block view that Bob creates the node type is an event (and that was not among my list of content types). I fumbled through creating one- would be helpful to have include a how to create an event content type link (and define fields) for the beginners.
Did anyone else have a problem logging into the webinar? I got an error message, then after that the Oct 6 date page. I'm using OS X 10.6 with latest Firefox and Chrome.
did it again, sorry for posting to the admins.
I did not get into the Webinar. I'm on Windows and I am so locked down it's ridiculous. I'm a recent Ubuntu convert and loving every minute of it. I hope there will be a screencast availble ???? anyone?
@ Jason... I think you maybe missed the time? Which timezone are you in? Uh oh. I'd better check the description. It is 12pm ET.
We had the webinar already, about 1.5 hrs ago it started. I'm sorry about that. Should we send out a reminder email a few hours before the webinar?
Is there a way to complete intermediate task 1 without using any code? I would love to be able to display the new content type in a grid, just don't know how.
Kristen:
You should be able to complete this task using Views instead of (as in the tutorial) editing a template file. For example, look at the page http://feline.dev3.webenabled.net/node/2/photos on my kitten site. It is built using Views out of two types of node:
1. A node of type "feline" containing the name, date of birth, and a brief comment: one node per kitten.
2. Several nodes of type "image" containing the photo and CCK node references to the "kitten" nodes. One photo and up to five node referenced for each of these nodes.
Using Views, I collect on one page all the photos whose nodes contain a reference to a particular kitten. I have to run now, but if you want, I can post a screenshot of the Views admin page.
I also found a tutorial on drupal.orgthat works through a very similar example. Just as there are many photos of each of my kittens, there are many songs by each musician: http://drupal.org/node/289738 . The odd thing (and the bottom three comments on that page agree with me) is that the tutorial suggests adding many node references, pointing to song nodes, to the musician's node. I would have put a single node reference, to the musician's node, in each song node.
Hi, for some reason maybe related with some failure on webenabled system, some of my yesterday's work disappeared!
Today i tried to access webenabled, but node dev3 have some failures:
Maybe some error on dev3 node and webenabled reverted to a previous snapshot!!
However I will try to redo the missing work and just installed "backup and migrate" module to prevent such problems.
When I look at my "dashboard" on WebEnabled, I see this warning message:
One of our hosting servers dev3.webenabled.net is currently under maintenance and being restored. This mostly affects trial accounts and development environments that were originally created under the trial plan. Please be patient as we restore dev3.webenabled.net over the next 1-2 hours. We are sorry for the inconvenience this may cause.
I think it has been more than 2 hours since I first saw that message. :-(
Yep, the problem was an corrupted filesystem..so only one day backup :(
As you may be aware the sites hosted on dev3.webenabled.net were down for a period of about 12 hours today. This was a 1 hour scheduled maintenance that began at 3am PDT Thursday, Sept. 30th. Unfortunately dev3 had a corrupted filesystem in the process of shutting down and rebooting.
The bad news:
1. We were only able to restore from 6am on Wednesday, September 29th.
2. This server was down for 12 hours instead of 1 hour.
3. Due to the nature of the issue we were not able to keep all affected users up to date as frequently as we would have liked to.
The good news:
1. We took the opportunity to move this system from ext3 to ext4 which is a much more advanced filesystem.
2. Upgraded kernel.
3. We have a plan of action for avoiding this situation in the future. Notably we'll make sure the backup for the previous day has completed before starting a maintenance cycle. This was a very unfortunate oversight on our part.
4. We plan to have more staff around to help in case of emergency and keep users informed about the situation.
We were in fact somewhat prepared - we were able to recover, after all. If we relied on RAID only (and not made backups), we wouldn't be able to recover now. Also, we did schedule the maintenance, and this helped - we had technical people around. Things would be worse if the filesystem corruption occurred after a power outage.
Again, we are very *sorry* for the inconvenience this issue may have caused. Please mail us at support@webenabled.com or contact at http://www.webenabled.com/contact if you have further concerns.
Best,
The WebEnabled Team
I had the same problem. When I logged in today, all the work I had done on the first task was gone. Had to start from scratch! Repetition is good for learning, bad for moral.
Finished tasks for week2, results and explanation:
http://pgomes.dev3.webenabled.net/blog/week-2-site-building
Very thorough!
Finished the first task of aggregating feeds - http://ida.dev3.webenabled.net/
It's a start!
Finished all the task - http://pac.dev3.webenabled.net/
The video "How To: Using View's Arguments" (http://gotdrupal.com/videos/drupal-views-arguments) is really fantastic!
I wanted to come back to Week 2 and share these links with everyone. I thought they were helpful.
5 essential modules
12 cck modules
6 node handling modules
8 views modules
7 miscellaneous modules
4 system modules
6 modules for configuration and administration
And here are the video versions of all of that in one location: http://vimeo.com/nodeone/videos/sort:date
Well done everyone, this is a really meaty topic. You can spend all of your time on Site Building, and many projects you can get completed through 90% site building with a small amount of custom coding.
@ Ida - I asked Salim about that, there was a temporary error on the service, but it was fixed quickly. It sounds like you lost some work. I'm sorry about that.
@ James - Those are great links! I love that series on NodeOne. They are a very well known Drupal shop in Europe. Would you like to add those to the Week 2 tasks?
http://p2pu.org/webcraft/introduction-drupal/document/week-2-tasks
Did you know you can "edit" these documents? You can edit the course materials directly.
I'd love if you wanted to give this a try, and add in the links where you think they belong. They could even have a "See more" list of links, if you like?
This is really the spirit of Peer to Peer University, and maybe I have failed in making it really clear how to do this. I will show this in the next webinar.