In this chapter we take a look at some of the most popular contributed modules to get a sense of what is possible with Drupal and which modules many sites are currently using. We'll take a quick look at:

• Views
• Token
• Pathauto
• Backup and Migrate
• Date
• Calendar
• Webform

In this chapter, we look at the Drupal file system configuration, and we set up our site to give us private file storage. We'll talk about what that means, and the benefits and drawbacks to Drupal's private files.

In this chapter Joe covers two really important tools for most sites: cron and search. We start by explaining what cron is, and how core provides us with a basic cron tool. We also walk through how to set up your own custom cron if the core settings don't suit you. Next we look at Drupal's core search and the various ways you can configure that.

In this chapter we're going to go through a launch checklist to make sure we have a few things all set up before we actually put our site out there. We discuss:

• error reporting settings
• 403 and 404 pages
• performance optimization and caching
• reviewing the status reports
• disabling unnecessary modules

In this chapter we talk about Drupal's taxonomy system, which is a way to organize our content. We'll walk through the steps to create a new vocabulary, add some terms, and then use it with our Press Release content type.

In this chapter, we talk all about changing the look and feel of your site with themes. We start by reviewing the settings that come with our default core theme, Bartik. Then we go to Drupal.org to look at available contributed themes, how to look for themes, and discuss what a base theme is. We'll finish up by actually installing a new contributed theme, Zero Point, and making some configuration changes.

In this video we'll start talking about the structure of content on the site by explaining what a content type is and how to create our own custom content types. First we review the two content types that are provided by Drupal core, Article and Basic Page, and then we dive into creating our own new content type, a Press Release. We also add a few fields and review configuring the field display.

For more instruction on using Fields and Image styles, check out these other series:
Intro to Fields for Site Builders
Image Styles

In this video we walk through two methods for downloading and installing new modules. First we use the administrative interface on our site to install a new module with a URL, and then we download a module directly from Drupal.org and place the files in the proper location in our Drupal files. We also talk about some best practices for organizing your modules in your file system.

To get things started in this series we'll install Drupal 7. We start in Drupal.org to download the code, review some important points to watch for when copying the files, then we show how to set up a database using PHPMyAdmin before we dive into the Drupal installer.

Additional resources

Installing Drupal 7 (Community Documentation on drupal.org)

This screencast covers the following topics:

• Manual import/export of Page manager settings.
• Import/export using Features.
• Some words about the custom rulesets module.
• Some words about the custom content panes module.
• Some words about the stylizer module.
• Some words (but not enough!) about mini panels.
• Some words about Panels everywhere.
• Some words and a quick demonstration of Panels in-place editor.

This screencast covers the following topics:

• Creating a Context display type in Views.
• Placing individual View rows in your custom page.
• Displaying other View render elements in your custom page (such as the pager or header).
• Using the View context to load further contextual object.

This screencast covers the following topics:

• Adding new contextual objects with manual selection.
• Adding new contextual objects with relationships.
• Chaining contextual objects, with the example of loading a node term, and then loading the term top level parent (or not).

This tutorial covers the following topics:

• The Contextual Administration module and variant type.
• Auto-populating node reference fields for new nodes.
• A quick glance at other functionality in Contextual Administration: vocabulary administration pages, user administration pages, quick content handling pages, and more.
• Using the local actions menu type.

This screencast covers the following topics:

• Rearranging the node edit form with Panels.
• Some words about how the render arrays in Drupal 7 makes this possible.

This screencast covers the following topics:

• Creating custom paths with Page manager
• Defining required and optional wildcards in a path
• Loading contextual objects from path arguments
• Creating access rules for custom pages
• Creating menu tabs, local actions and other visible menu items
• Making menu items only show in certain circumstances, such as only on selected node types

This screencast covers the following topics:

• Using visibility rules to determine when panes should show
• Using per-pane or per-page caching
• Setting caching granularity to per context or per argument
• Editing basic pane settings
• Moving panes between different panel regions
• Some layout settings for panes

This screencast covers the following topics:

• Setting name, description and category for view panes
• Overriding the title of the view
• Overriding the number of items to display
• Some other override options
• The "context is optional" setting for argument input/contextual filter value input

This screencast covers the following topics:

• What is Panels?
• Selecting Panels layout
• Disabling block regions on a panel page
• Adding content to a panel
• Outputting individual node fields in a panel page
• Manually setting the title on a panel page
• Inheriting page title from a panel pane

This screencast covers the following topics:

• How to create additional variants to a custom page
• How to set selection rules with more than one condition
• Why the order of variants is important, and how to change their order

This screencast covers the following topics about the Page Manager module, which is a module included within CTools.

• The basic framework of Page manager – creating custom paths and assigning content/reactions to them
• Mentioning some modules that can be used with Page manager, such as Panels and Contextual administration
• Overriding node templates to allow customized content/reaction
• Introduction to variants
• Introduction to selection rules
• Using the HTTP response code variant type, and using it for redirections
• Introduction to context or contextual objects