Giving visitors a chance to evaluate and rate content is an extremely common pattern on content-rich websites. In addition to giving visitors a way to jump to the best content, it can give you a way to determine what content on your site is most effective. In this lesson we'll discuss:
- Voting API module
- Fivestar module
Additional resources
For the Super Duper Chefs site, we’ll be using both of the Fivestar module’s unique features: adding a static Rating field to the “Product review” content type for the editors to use, and attaching a voting widget to the comment form on each review for the site readers to use. That approach will keep the official rating on each review separate from the reader ratings. In this lesson we'll:
- Add the Product Rating Field
- Add the Reader Rating Field
Additional resources
Drupal’s theming system gives designers complete control over how a site’s content is rendered for a web browser, and custom themes can give any site a distinctive look. But sometimes it’s useful to make minor tweaks to a site’s appearance using nothing but CSS rules. They allow designers to tweak font sizes, colors, and so on without altering the underlying HTML that defines the site’s structure. In this lesson we'll look at:
- CSS Injector module
- Explain how this works
Additional resources
Although our “Product review” content type has all of the data we need, the individual reviews still look a bit untidy. In this lesson, we’ll do some final tweaking to make the review display look nice and tidy.
- Setting Field Display Options
- Configuring CSS Injector
Additional resources
Now that we have a few products, we really ought to add a listing page that lets visitors look over all of the products that have been reviewed, comparing official ratings with visitor ratings and sorting by various criteria. This is a perfect job for Views. In this lesson:
- Create a Product Finder view
- Display Amazon information
- Display voting results
Additional resources
In this lesson, we will cover the basics of getting code into version control using the Mac app "Tower" and then making the first commit and pushing it to the remote repository we will setup on beanstalkapp.com.
Features is a module which generates modules for us. You can then extend that module just as you would any other Drupal module. In this video we'll add some additional code to our feature to make it more complete for our needs, outside of the realm of what Features itself can provide.
The features module (and the drush command) are pretty smart about not overwriting custom changes, and your chances of overwriting your custom code are pretty slim. When features exports a module it creates a .module file with only one line of code in it. Which is an include for another file: mymodule.features.inc. Features then puts all of the automatically generated code into this included file. When you regenerate or update a feature it just uses the existing mymodule.module file which maintains any code that you wrote, and then regenerates the mymodule.features.inc and associated files.
Additional resources
Features project (Drupal.org)
Introduction to Drush Series (Drupalize.Me)
https://github.com/DrupalizeMe/drupalize-lullablog (GitHub.com)
James Sansbury defines Features (a module that helps organize site components and applications for specific use cases), as distinct from Nodes and other forms of site content.
Prerequisites
This series assumes that you can install Drupal 7, create a basic content type, create a basic view, and use Drush. See the following resources if you need a refresher:
- Create a New Content Type
- Creating a New View
- Introduction to Drush series
- Installing Drupal with Drush
Additional resources
Features project (Drupal.org)
We'll create our very first feature and then see how it works by putting on our production site and enabling it.
Additional resources
Features project (Drupal.org)
Introduction to Drush Series (Drupalize.Me)
Hands-On: Generating Sample Content (Drupalize.Me)
https://github.com/DrupalizeMe/drupalize-lullablog (GitHub.com)
Before we set up a multisite we need to understand how Apache and Drupal work together to deliver the site we intend. In this lesson we'll look at the documentation for Drupal multisites, and then discuss the way you need to set up your Drupal directories. We'll also review the workflow that Apache and Drupal go through to get the correct site displaying in the browser.
Additional resources
Multi-site - Sharing the same code base (drupal.org)
In this lesson we'll be building a simple university site, udrupal.com, with different areas, each with their own website: the main site, a news site, and an alumni site. The news site is simply a subdomain of the main domain name, news.udrupal.com, and the alumni site actually has its own separate domain name, udrupalalumni.com. To get this done, you're going to learn how to confirm the DNS is working for the domain names. That is, that they are currently pointing to the right server. Then we're going to configure an Apache vhost on our server so that Apache knows where to find our Drupal code base. We'll finish things up by installing our main Drupal site, udrupal.com.
Additional resources
With our domains and Apache configuration in place, we need to make sure all three sites can be installed at the different domains by creating our multisite directories in the sites folder. In this tutorial, we'll create the necessary Drupal site directories and settings files for the three sites so they are all running smoothly, check the domains and install the other two sites, and wrap up by changing the theme on the alumni site.
Before we get started, you should make sure you have two empty databases created for the two new sites we'll be installing.
In this tutorial we're going to be working directly on a server using the command line. You can feel free to use a GUI interface for your site, like an SFTP app or just your local machine file browser and editor apps. If you want to brush up on using the command line, you can check out our free Command Line Basics series.
If we want to do development work on the university multisite, we need to do a few things to have this run smoothly in a local development environment with all of those URLs. The sites.php file is going to let us define aliases for the site configuration folders in /sites. In this tutorial we'll explain why local development with multisite is tricky, and how to get it set up properly.
Additional resources
example.sites.php (api.drupal.org)
Drush is a really great tool for managing your Drupal site quickly and easily. If you don't already know about Drush, you should definitely check it out. When working with a multisite installation though, Drush can get confused if you don't give it all the information it needs. In this lesson we'll walk through how to use Drush properly with a multisite installation, covering both how to manage just an individual site and how to work with all of your sites at the same time.
One of the best ways to improve both the speed, and relevancy, of search results for a Drupal site is to stop using the Drupal core search module and start using Apache Solr. Solr is a Java-based application that provides an API for interacting with Apache Lucene via HTTP to facilitate the creation of excellent applications for performing full-text content searches, with a special focus on internet-based search applications. The quick pitch for why you should use Solr is it's insanely fast, especially when compared with Drupal's default Search module, and it can be scaled to handle millions of search queries per second and huge piles of data.
Since Solr is a third party application we need a way to bridge the gap between Solr and Drupal. Really, there are two parts to this puzzle: getting the data out of Drupal and into Solr so it can be processed and indexed, and passing a search query from Drupal to Solr in order to retrieve, and display, search results. For that, we'll use the Search API module, and the Search API Solr module.
In order to demonstrate a real-world use case we'll pretend that we're the owner of a website that contains a database of fish species. As the database has grown over time we've begun to feel the limits of Drupal's MySQL full-text search and want to improve our search tools. Using Solr will allow for better matches in full-text search, faster searches, and a lot of additional functionality like partial word matches, spell checking, facets, and more.
In this series we'll cover:
- What Apache Solr is and why you should consider using it
- Installing Solr and configuring it to work well with Drupal content
- The contributed Search API module
- The contributed Search API Solr module
- Configuring Drupal to send content to Solr for indexing
- Retrieving search results from Solr and displaying them in Drupal on both a stand-alone page and with the Views module
- Using Solr field boosting to influence result relevancy
- Using the contributed Facet API module with Solr to allow for faceted search results
- Configuring stop words, synonyms, and promoted search results in Solr
This series is for anyone that wants to improve the quality of the search functionality of their Drupal-powered site. There is some system administration required to install Solr, but it's pretty straightforward. Almost everything else is done via configuration in Drupal's, or Solr's, user interface and by editing simple XML configuration files. So, no PHP, or module development experience required. We do however assume that you're already familiar with basic Drupal administration.
Additional resources
Apache Solr is a world class search application built on top of the Lucene indexer. Before we start trying to integrate Solr with Drupal lets talk about what Solr is, and what makes it so good, as well as how Solr differs from the Drupal core database-backed Search module. This tutorial is a short presentation explaining Solr, Lucene, and things to consider when choosing Solr as a search technology.
Lucene is an open-source search indexer written in Java and governed by the Apache foundation. It is the underlying library that handles storing indexed content, and does so in a way that makes it extremely flexible. By treating each record as a document made up of any number of different fields Lucene is capable of storing just about anything you throw at it, as long as the resource can be broken up into fields and the textual data can be extracted from those fields. This makes it a good choice for indexing web based content where you might be dealing with HTML, PDF, XML, Microsoft Word, and all kinds of other document formats.
Solr, is an HTTP API for interacting with the Lucene application that makes it easier to create custom search applications. Like Lucene it is also open source, written in Java, and governed by the Apache foundation. Solr's extensive use of XML configuration files allows you to modify almost everything about how Solr works without having to write any Java. This makes it a great choice for anyone that's familiar with PHP but doesn't have Java experience.
When compared with Drupal core's Search module, or any MySQL full-text search tool, Solr has some distinct advantages. Including:
- Best-in-class stemming and tokenization
- Scalability; it's designed to scale both vertically and horizontally as needed
- Built-in support for facets, geospatial searches, and other advanced query options
In addition to these advantages, using Solr for your search can dramatically improve your Drupal site's performance by eliminating costly full-text queries, which can quickly turn MySQL into a bottleneck for sites with even a modest amount of content.
By the end of this tutorial you should be able to explain the advantages that Solr provides over Drupal core's search module and why it's a good choice for building ultra-fast, and accurate, search applications.
Additional resources
When it comes to integrating Apache Solr with Drupal there are currently two different modules that can be used, Search API, and the Apache Solr module. While both are valid options, for this series we've chosen to focus on the Search API module because amongst other things it's generally more flexible, and based on conversations with people in the community who are working on Solr integration it is currently seeing more focused development efforts and will likely superseded the Apache Solr module sometime in the future.
This tutorial provides some background information on the Search API module and why we've chosen to use it. We'll look at how the Search API module bridges the gap between Solr and Drupal, and explain some of the commonly used terms we'll encounter in the module's UI and codebase.
By the end of this lesson you should be able to explain the Search API module's terminology, requirements, and position in the Drupal ecosphere, as well as be able to make a good case for why someone should choose the Search API module as a starting point for creating better search tools in Drupal.
Additional resources
Before we can start building a search application we need some sample data that we can index and use for testing, not to mention a site we can use to test this all out on. In this tutorial we'll walk through installing Drupal 7 and importing some sample data.
In order for this to work I built a Drupal 7 site with a content type named Fish, and then imported a whole bunch of descriptions of various fish from Wikipedia. You should be able to use the provided database dump in order to get up and running with a sample Drupal site pre-populated with some sample data.
If you're not planning on following along and building the fish finder application in the Search API and Solr series, or are planning on implementing Solr search on your own site instead you can probably skip this tutorial. Just note that the rest of the tutorials in the series assume you've got a working Drupal 7 site with some content.
By the end of this tutorial you should have a working Drupal 7 site with sample content running on your localhost for playing with while watching the rest of the series.
Solr is an application that runs on it's own, independent of Drupal. So before we can integrate our Drupal site with the Solr server we first need to install Solr and get it running. In this tutorial we'll walk through the requirements for installing Solr and then look at a quick and easy way to get it running on our localhost for development purposes. This setup is best for when you're working on a site locally, but have it hosted elsewhere and someone else is managing your Solr install for you.
The basic process is to download the Solr application, unpack it somewhere on your localhost, and then run the start.jar file that comes with the example application: java -jar start.jar. To ensure it's working you can connect to the Solr web UI on your localhost at http://localhost:8983/solr/.
Note: When using Solr with Drupal and the Search API module we currently need to use the most recent 4.x version of Solr, despite the fact that there is a 5.x version that just came out. At the time these tutorials where recorded the Search API module had not yet been updated to work with Solr >= 5.x. The general installation instructions for localhost development however are not likely to change much at all between Solr 4 and 5 so even if you're using Solr 5 this should still be relevant information.
By the end of this tutorial you should be able to run Solr on your localhost and verify that it is working.