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.
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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.
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For our Mom and Pop site, we're going to need to sort out how to set up access control for our users. In this lesson we'll review our users and their access needs, check and create the roles we need, and then create users.
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With roles and users in place on the site, we have a good start, but we aren't actually controlling access very well until we set up the permissions to go with those. In this lesson we need to set permissions for our roles, and take a look at some important security concerns around permissions. Finally, we'll test our access control by logging in as our users to make sure everything is acting as it should.
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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.
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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.
In this series we've provided an overview of Drupal’s major functionality by walking you through building a small website, Mom and Pop, Inc. To wrap things up we're going to take a tour of the new Mom & Pop, Inc, website, and discuss our implementation points as we walk through it. Then we'll review the modules and resources we've discussed in this series.
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Drupalize.Me Guide: Using Drupal Book by O'Reilly Media
Up next: Using Drupal Chapter 3: Job Board
Drupal gives you a lot of tools to move things around and arrange the functionality of your site, but often the main difference between most websites comes down to presentation. Themes are the Drupal method for controlling your site’s presentation. In this lesson we'll discuss finding a theme, and installing and configuring themes. A big part of understanding how themes can change your layout lies in understanding blocks and regions, so we'll cover what those are, and why they're important. Then we'll talk briefly about administration themes and how they are different from your main theme.
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Now it’s time to make the site look less like Drupal and more like Mom and Pop, Inc. In this lesson we'll modify the core Bartik theme by changing the site logo and the color scheme to match what we need for our project.
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This series will introduce you to the two most powerful features in Drupal: Fields and Views, fundamental building blocks when it comes to building Drupal sites. The Field module allows you to customize entry forms for entities, nodes and users, and comments. The Views module is the perfect counterpart to Field in that instead of putting content into your site through an entry form, Views allows you to get that content back out again in the way that you want.
In this lesson, we're going to be looking at building a job posting board for a university. We'll examine our case study and what it is that we need to do for this job posting board. Drupal core provides this site with a lot of good starting pieces, but we're also going to need to use some additional modules. We're going to focus on the core Field and Field UI and File field in order to create the custom forms that we need for the input for jobs and applications.
If you'd like to follow along with this series, you should install the Using Drupal Source Code and use the Chapter 3 Job Posting Board Installation Profile during the installation process,
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The Field module provides an extremely flexible framework for creating forms to enter content. In past versions of Drupal, this was provided by a contributed module called the Content Construction Kit, or CCK, but this now a feature that comes with Drupal core itself. In this lesson we're going to get an overview of the Field module and the pieces it provides, including field types, input widgets, displays, view modes, and formatters. We'll also take a look at reusing existing fields and what that means.
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To build this site, we’ll need to go beyond the default “Basic page” and “Article” content types offered by Drupal core. To get started with our job posting website, let’s think about the different content types needed to build all the functionality that we require. The site requires two different types: a Job Posting and a Job Application. In this lesson we'll map out our content type needs, and see what fields were going to use. Then we'll create the Job content type, making sure we add needed fields and set permissions so that it is working as expected.
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The References module is a contributed module that allows you to create relationships between nodes and/or users. In this lesson we will take a look at the References project, explaining how References work, and then discuss some similar modules out there you may want to investigate.
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Now we need to add a primary contact for the job position we've created. This will usually be the person creating the entry, but we’ll allow the user to enter any of the possible faculty members on the site. This will be done as a “User reference” field, provided by the contributed References module.
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For usability, it’s often important to display forms and page contents in a specific order, and to add formatting so that it’s more clear what data is being presented. In this lesson we'll modify our Job content by reordering the fields, changing the field label display, and looking at how we can hide particular fields.
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Now that the university is able to create job postings, it would be helpful if prospective employees could submit resumés to the positions in which they’re interested. In this lesson we will build out the Job Application content type. We will need to add another reference field, this time a node reference, to tie the applications to the correct job. To make it possible for applicants to submit their resumé we'll also need to add an upload field so that applicants can upload a document of specified file types.
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The Views module provides listings of data on your site: users, comments, nodes, and more. Any listing of data provided by the Views module is called a view, and most Drupal websites today use Views in many different ways. In this lesson we'll get an overview of the Views module, including some specific concepts and terminology like Data Types and Displays, along with a tour of the major view settings and what they do.
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The requirements of our site include two different main views. One view is a public-facing list, showing all the available jobs to users of the site. In this lesson we'll create our first view by enabling the modules we need, walking through the Views wizard to get our basic view in place, and then modifying various settings for our fields and working with contextual filters.
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The Applications view will serve both as a tool for administrators and as a reference for users, with three different displays. In this lesson, we'll start to build the Applications view by creating the default display with our first listing, which is a master list of all the applications on the site. To pull in all of the information we're going to need, we'll begin working with Views relationships.
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With our basic Applications view built, we have our default display. We also need another faculty display on the site. This second list will be largely the same as the default list, but it needs to show up as a tab on a job posting node, and only list the applications which relate to that particular job. We're going to need to create a new display, and override certain settings, plus add in a contextual filter, in order to get this view completed.