In this lesson, I provide a recap of the Panels-related tutorials in this series.
Additional resources
Building Websites in Drupal 7 using Panels — Drupalize.Me
Customize Panels Styles with CTools Style Plugins — Drupalize.Me
Display Suite is another popular module for handling the layout and display of content on a Drupal site. In this next set of tutorials, we'll take a look at how markup is affected in Drupal when using Display Suite.
Additional resources
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a custom layout to use in Display Suite. We’ll take a look at the instructions in Display Suite’s ds.api.php file to find out how to provide our own custom layout. In this process, we’ll take a shortcut and copy a layout from Display Suite into my custom theme and modify it. In the next tutorial, we’ll look at the drush command ds-build which allows you to quickly scaffold a display suite custom layout in your module or theme.
Additional resources
Now that we have gained an understanding of how to create a custom layout manually (in the previous tutorial), we’ll look at the drush command ds-build which allows you to quickly scaffold a Display Suite custom layout in your module or theme.
Additional resources
In this tutorial, I will show you how to add a CSS class to apply to a region using Display Suite.
Additional resources
Content Types
TopicA content type is a subtype of the [content entity](link to Entity topic). When a content creator goes to add new content to the site, they are presented with a list of content types to choose from to get the appropriate form to fill out.
Drupal's content moderation and workflow tools allow you to configure and support a flexible multistep publication process.
An overview of some of our favorite Drupal documentation resources.
Fields and the Field API
TopicFields are the building blocks of Drupal's powerful content modeling system. The Field API allows for the development of custom field types to suit almost any data display and collection needs.
Many sites require the ability to upload, manage, and display various assets like files, images, videos, and audio.
Multilingual Sites
TopicA multilingual site has more than 1 language that users interact with, either through the content, the user interface, or both.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your online content, so that your content will rank higher in organic (non-paid) search engine results.
Views Module in Drupal
TopicLearn to use data from your Drupal site to create customized lists in various forms, such as bulleted lists, grids, calendars, or sliders.
Drupal manages information and access for all visitors to your site, called users, through a system of roles and permissions.
Taxonomy
TopicTaxonomy in Drupal provides a way to classify your site’s content. Taxonomy vocabularies are created with terms within those vocabularies.
As Drupal site-builders and developers we are all very aware that Drupal 7 is not the most useful product out of the box. We constantly add modules and custom code to make Drupal do what we need. There is nothing wrong with this, in fact it is what attracts people to using Drupal in the first place. The block system that comes with core is what we get after installation as our real only means to laying "stuff" out for our website. People have done things like turning nodes into blocks, or making every block on our a site a view. These concepts work, but have a lot of draw backs for usability and performance. There are lots of layout tools to use, but this series is going to take a look at the Context and Bean modules. These two modules are really two completely different modules but when used together give us some pretty powerful options in place of Drupal's core block system.
Additional resources
One of the key problems with the block system in core is it's very limiting. You are limited to a small set of tools for when and how to show a block. Once you lay out your blocks you are basically done—blocks can't be placed in multiple regions. Most importantly, block configurations are not exportable. With the Context module, you lay things out based on the context of your site. A block can exist in one region for one context and a different region for another. Essentially Context is a more advanced block placement form.
In this lesson we'll get started with Context by installing the module on our site, and then walking through the user interface we have to work with. We'll discuss things like conditions and reactions, and see how things are set up.
In this lesson we will build our first simple context. We will create a custom block that contains copyright information. We will use Context and the "site-wide" condition to place this custom block in the footer region of our site.