We're almost done with our site, but we still need to have some way for people to indicate if they are coming to an event. In this lesson we'll enable and configure an Attendance flag, adding it to our Event content type. Once we have it all set up we will flag an event to see how it works in action.
Additional resources
We now have events and people can mark if they are going or not, and the final piece to wrap this project up is to get a list of those attendees for an event. We're going to use Views again to handle this for us. In this lesson we're going to create a new View for attendees, and using relationships and contextual filters, we'll make sure it only lists the attendees for a specific event. With that in place, we'll add the view as a tab to the Event nodes so you can quickly and easily see who is attending that event as you navigate through the content.
Additional resources
The site we have built covers all of the needs for the club. Down the road, the members may want to spruce things up a bit. In this lesson we'll look at a few modules that could round out the site even more:
- Full Calendar
- Countdown
- Flag Actions (part of Flag)
- OpenLayers
Additional resources
In this chapter, we have looked at building an event management site for the Aurora Book Club, making use of the Date field, the Calendar plug-in for Views, and the Flag module for handling attendance. The book club now has a handy calendar that is displayed on the site and available in iCal format. They also have an easy-to-find list of all the attendees for each event. The site is simple and easy to use, yet fits all of the club’s needs quite nicely. In this summary we'll take a tour of the Aurora Book Club site to see what we've built, and discuss our implementation points. Then we'll wrap up with a quick review of of modules we talked about in this series.
Additional resources
Drupalize.Me Guide: Using Drupal Book by O'Reilly Media
Up next: Using Drupal Chapter 7: Managing Publishing Workflows
When many people are involved in your site publication workflow, things can get complicated quickly. In this series, we’ll build out a full editorial workflow process for a new site.
In this lesson, we're going to look at the use case -- what is the project that we're building, and what are the requirements that we need to meet? Then we’ll discuss which contributed modules and aspects of the core we’ll use to meet the needs of our client in this use case. We’ll set up editorial teams so each team can work on its own section, and allow administrators to change the default publishing settings for each content type. We’ll use different parts of the Workbench module to help us ease this entire workflow that we need, and create roles and users who only have access to specific topics.
Additional resources
One of the basic tools for any news site, and most sites with a lot of content generally, is taxonomy. Taxonomy may sound like a big, fancy word, but it’s just a technical term for a way of organizing and classifying things, like content on a website. If you’ve sorted your family photo album, filed your email in folders, or argued with a friend about whether a band is punk or ska, you’ve already worked with taxonomies! If a site has a lot of content, editors need a way to group it into categories. By doing so, they make it possible for users to easily navigate the website and find the content they’re looking for. Additionally, assigning content to categories, whether by using a predefined set of sections or a free-for-all tagging system, opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities. For instance, site builders can expose content with similar tags on article pages. Or they can turn the category pages into rich landing pages, pulling in all kinds of different content that has the same categories assigned to it. In this lesson we will cover the basic things you need to understand about Drupal taxonomies: vocabularies, terms, and how to use them with content types.
Additional resources
The Taxonomy module is included in core and is enabled by default when you install Drupal, along with a Tags vocabulary, which you can use to allow users to freely tag their content. In this lesson, we'll create a new vocabulary, populate it with the terms we need, and then add the vocabulary to our article content type.
Additional resources
In the Drupal Jumpstart series, you learned about Drupal paths and how to use clean URLs. One reason to use clean URLs is so that they don’t look so ugly. That helps, but still leaves the URLs lacking a bit. Having a URL with node/123 in it doesn’t really tell either humans or search engines much about the page itself. Isn’t it much better to have a URL with something like "article/new-moon-discovered" in it? That will be much more memorable, and the addition of pertinent keywords in the URL makes for better search engine optimization. In this lesson we'll look at a module that helps us automate this process, Pathauto. We'll get an overview of core path aliases, and how pathauto patterns and replacement tokens work.
Additional resources
To get those handy human-readable URLs on our site, we are going to use the Pathauto module. As we discussed earlier, this relies on the Token module as well as the core Path module. The Pathauto settings are divided over two pages: one page to set up the actual replacement patterns, and another one to configure Pathauto’s general settings. These configuration pages can seem a bit intimidating at first. Luckily, most of the defaults are what most sites will want to use anyway, so that makes our job with configuration a lot simpler than it may first appear. In this lesson we'll configure some path patterns using tokens, and then get all of our existing content using the new patterns by using the bulk update feature of Pathauto.
Additional resources
We need to create an editorial process for our site, which can seem complex at first. We need to provide some form of access control, so that editors who are responsible for the “culture” section on the site can only see draft articles in that particular section. On top of that, we need an editorial workflow that integrates with that access control feature so the editors can control which content is in which state at any given time. Lucky for us, Workbench provides exactly what we need. In this lesson we'll get an overview of what comes in the Workbench project and get a look at the main My Workbench page.
Additional resources
We have a lot of work to do to set up our editorial workflow. In this lesson, we’ll focus on getting the basics started, and continue with the more advanced work in future lessons. In this lesson we'll enable the main Workbench module, and configure the permissions. Then we'll take a quick look at the My Workbench area to make sure we have it set up correctly.
Additional resources
Since we haven’t been creating much content on our site, the My Workbench page is rather empty. This can make it hard to understand what’s going on and to grasp the module’s possibilities. This is a situation that you’ll encounter often when developing a site: at a certain point, you need content to test a certain feature, or to verify what a certain section on your site will look like. The Devel Generate module, which comes with the Devel module allows us to quickly generate sample content, users, taxonomy, and menu items, so testing functionality on our new site becomes a lot easier, since it will more closely resemble an actual site. In this lesson we'll enable and configure Devel Generate, and then run it to get a bunch of filler content set up on our site.
Additional resources
The next step in our editorial workflow is to combine Workbench with our News Section vocabulary to allow content management to be delegated according to existing editorial groups. To do this we'll use the Workbench Access module, which is included in the Workbench package. In this lesson we'll review how Workbench Access integrates with various hierarchies, and understand what Sections are, and the setting we have available to us.
Additional resources
Let’s extend our Workbench implementation with one of the more advanced features our client has asked for. We’ll build upon the structure we’ve created with the Taxonomy module (the “News sections” vocabulary), and use that to grant users with specific roles access to content tagged with one of the “News sections” terms. In this lesson we’ll start with a little preparation work by creating new roles and users so we can test our access control to make sure it is working as expected.
Additional resources
As you’ve probably guessed by now, we’ll create an access control mechanism that grants users with the “national editor” role editorial access to content tagged with the term “national news.” Users that have the role “cultural editor” will eventually get editorial access to content that has the term “culture” attached. In this lesson we'll limit our users to the correct section by configuring Workbench Access, setting the correct permissions, and then assigning our content to sections. This will get everything in place to finish up our access control.
Additional resources
With so much information, and so many products, on the web today, people often want to get an opinion to help rank and rate things. Should I buy this widget? Should I watch this movie? In this series, we’re going to use a handful of Drupal modules to build a product review website that lets community members give their opinions, along with a way to rate their review as well. To kick things off, in this lesson we will:
- Review the Super Duper Chefs case study
- Discuss our implementation
Additional resources
To get started, we'll need to create a content type to use for our product reviews. Based on the Super Duper Chefs requirements, in this lesson we'll:
- Create the Product Review Content Type
- Add a Field group
- Set permissions
Additional resources
Amazon.com is one of a large number of web-based businesses that have opened up their product information databases for other sites to access. In the case of Super Duper Chefs, we want to retrieve useful data like product photos, pricing, and manufacturer information for display on our own website. The Amazon module for Drupal allows us to do just that. In this lesson we'll take a look at the Amazon module, by starting with:
- What’s Included?
- Locale
- Referral settings
- Amazon keys
Additional resources
In a previous lesson in this series, we set up a content type for our product reviews. Now, we’re ready to add a field to store a link to the product on Amazon.com. In this lesson we'll:
- Enable and configure the Amazon module
- Get our Amazon key
- Add the Product Field
Note that Amazon changes the way they manage keys over time, so the way they are generated in the lesson may have changed. Please review the official AWS Product Advertising API documentation for current key generation instructions.
Additional resources
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