Chapter 14. Final Thoughts
CourseClear Drupal's Cache
FreeKnowing how to clear Drupal's cache is an important skill for any developer. You'll likely find yourself doing it frequently in order to get Drupal to register the changes you make to your code, or other updates you make via the UI. It is also a good first step to trouble shooting problems with your Drupal site: Clear the cache before you do any other debugging to ensure it's not just a bad cache entry.
Managing Media in Drupal
CourseWhat Is Drupal?
FreeTo learn more about how to get started with Drupal, also see our Introduction to Drupal guide.
In this lesson we take a look at Drupal, the open source Content Management System. We learn about the major components of a Drupal site and the library of constantly evolving tools available for working with Drupal. We find out how to see who uses it, by looking at DrupalShowcase.com and Drupal case studies on Drupal.org, among others. We look at Drupal's major features, such as Modules.
With this overview we have some context as we move forward into the series.
Additional resources
In this lesson we're going to break down the "Drupal stack" to understand what pieces are working here and how they relate to each other. We'll take a tour of the major components of Drupal itself, like nodes and users, and then have a brief discussion about ways of organizing content.
Additional resources
In this lesson we're going to start building our site for Mom and Pop, Inc. We're starting off by working on our content, to get things filled out a little. First, we'll create an About Us page with the basic info for the store, like address and opening hours. Then we'll create our first article, which welcomes people to the new site, and see how the two core content types, Basic page and Article, are different from each other. Then we'll tweak our main navigation so our tabs display correctly, and finish things off by looking at block management. We'll remove the "Powered by Drupal" block and add a new block to the site for our weekly specials.
Additional resources
This lesson offers a tour of some of the most basic tools for content management in Drupal. We're going to walk through and explain the following pieces:
- Content
- Comments
- Navigation
- Blocks
Additional resources
For this lesson we're going to get hands-on and play around in our administration area a little. We're going to review the site information for our new site, and then change things by setting the site name to match our case study.
Additional resources
In this lesson we're going to start off with the Drupal administrative interface. We'll take a tour of the major elements and get you oriented to what is where.
Additional resources
Modules allow you to turn on and off functionality within your Drupal website. There are two types of modules: core modules, which come with Drupal itself, and contributed modules, which are provided for free by the Drupal community and available for download from Drupal.org. In this lesson we're going to look at the module administration page, and walk through finding and installing modules. We'll wrap things up by discussing how you remove a module from your site, and the difference between disabling and uninstalling.
Additional resources
The easiest way to wrap your head around how modules work is to try installing and configuring a couple of them. This section will cover how to install, enable, and configure a contributed module called Using Drupal, 2nd edition
One of the most powerful features of Drupal is its rich, fine-grained access control system, based around the concept of users, roles, and permissions. In this lesson we'll explain what these pieces are, and how they work together. We'll also discuss the user profile and various user account settings we can manipulate.
Additional resources
When you open the floodgates for your users to become active participants in content creation, one of the inevitable things that comes up is the issue of content moderation—that is, ensuring that abusive, vulgar content and unsolicited advertising or spam is kept off the site and stays off. In this lesson, we'll look at using an automated spam detection, with Mollom, as well as manual spam prevention.
Additional resources
Drupalize.Me Guide: Using Drupal Book by O'Reilly Media
Note: Mollom is EOL (End Of Life). See this blog post by Drupal community member Jeff Geerling for alternative solutions.