In this Lullabot Module Monday lesson, we take a look at the Style Guide module. Comparing Drupal themes is tough: the screenshots they provide are often based on heavily tweaked sites with plenty of slider blocks, tweaked media attachments, and other just-so content. Figuring out the "basics" — how a given theme styles core HTML elements and recurring Drupal interface patterns — can be tough! Fortunately, the Style Guide module can help.
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In this Lullabot Module Monday lesson we are introduced to the Publish Button module. It's a simple problem, but a serious one. You've put your content editors in front of Drupal for the first time, and they can understand the node form without any problems. They understand taxonomy terms, grok menus and node references… but they get nervous when it's time to save their work. "Will... will this be published as soon as I click 'save?'" Normally, there's no good way to make the distinction between saving and publishing a piece of content explicit. Site builders can set a content type to be unpublished by default, then give editors the broad "administer nodes" permission, but that's clumsy solution that forces editors to dig for what should be a simple action: publishing or unpublishing a post. That's where the Publish Button module comes in.
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In this Lullabot Module Monday article, we learn about the Mass Password Reset module. It's a question we all ask ourselves: What would I do if my site or server was compromised? Security professionals have loads of checklists to follow, and experienced server administrators drill for those moments. As we saw when Twitter.com was compromised by hackers, "Reset everyone's passwords, right away!" is almost always one of the important steps. If you run a Drupal site, that particular step can be frustrating. Resetting user passwords one by one is incredibly time consuming, and there's no way to do it for everyone in one fell swoop. At least, there wasn't until the release of the Mass Password Reset module.
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In this Lullabot Module Monday lesson we take a look at the Backup and Migrate module. Few things are more terrifying than the realization that a server hiccup has wiped out a web site, or a hasty change deployed to the live site has nuked important content. Fortunately, there's a module that can help. Backup and Migrate offers site builders a host of options for manually and automatically backing up their sites' databases, and integrates with third-party backup services, to boot!
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In this Lullabot Module Monday lesson we look at the Word Link module. It's a simple problem, but a tricky one: How can you ensure that special words and phrases, like your company's name or certain trademarks, are always linked to an appropriate web site when they're used in the text of an article? The easy answer is Word Link module: it lets you set up a custom glossary of terms that should be turned into links whenever the appear in text.
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In this Lullabot Module Monday lesson we walk through the useful Menu Position module. It's a word that can strike fear into the heart of the bravest site builder: Breadcrumbs. Manage them well, and you'll give visitors a helpful visual indicator of where they're at in your site. Miss a detail, and the weird inconsistencies will be more confusing than no breadcrumbs at all. The challenges stem from Drupal's "flat hierarchy" -- by default, almost all pages (including every node you create) live just beneath the home page itself in an undifferentiated pool of content. All of the visual cues it sends to visitors (breadcrumb trails, highlighted parent items in the navigation menus, and so on) start with that assumption until you override them. That's where the Menu Position module helps out. It lets you set up simple rules that tell Drupal where each node type should go in the site's hierarchy, then handles all of the frustrating details automatically.
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The Entity Views Attachment (EVA) module extends the Views module to allow you to attach a view to any entities on your site. Views on its own will let you create a page for your view, with its own URL, and it also lets you attach multiple views to the same Views page, but it doesn't let you do something like attach a view to a node, or a user. This lesson walks through a simple example of creating a basic view listing published articles on a site, and then using EVA to attach that view to user profiles, and making sure that we only list the published articles for that user, using a contextual filter.
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The Views Bulk Operations (VBO) module is a great extension for the Views module, which allows you to add bulk operation checkboxes and actions to any view. You often see bulk operations on various Drupal core administration pages, like the content administration screen, which lets you select multiple pieces of content, and then perform an action, like publishing or deleting, on all items at the same time. VBO lets you add this to your administrative screens, which allows you to create very customized reports that also have time-saving actions available to them as well.
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We introduce code deployment without a terminal using beanstalkapp.com.
Deployment means moving your code from environments such as local to production – with version control, which allows for backups, fixing mistakes, and collaborative environments.
Git is the type of version control used in Drupal, and we'll discuss Git in this lesson.
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Deploying Your Code
FreeIn this lesson we will take the code we have committed to our remote repository and manually push it to our production server. We will cover how to setup deployments on beanstalkapp.com and the some of the advantages of using a tool like this.
A question we are commonly asked is: how did your production environment recognize the new feature?
Answer: Reverting a feature reverts it back to what is in code. So by updating the code it always looks to the code so there is no need to revert it. You usually revert a feature if you have made changes that are stored in the database and you need it to look back to the code as your database changes are not what you wanted or are wrong. If the changes you made in the database are what you want, then you update/recreate the feature.
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.
In this lesson we will cover using Lightbox2 and Colorbox with content in your site. Taking a lightbox beyond just enlarging images, we will demonstrate displaying nodes and using Views with a lightbox.
In this lesson we will use both the Lightbox2 and Colorbox modules in actual real world uses. We will demonstrate how to use each module or helper modules to use with images, create slideshows and galleries.
In this lesson, we will take a look at the Colorbox module and its configuration page. We also will discuss some other helper modules that work great with Colorbox. Later in the series, we will demonstrate some uses of Colorbox and techniques to make the most of it.
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Modules Needed
External
In this lesson we will cover the configuration pages for the Lightbox2 module. This module offers a ton of options and the configuration page can be daunting. Later in the series, as we get into using Lightbox2, we will demonstrate how to apply some of these configurations.
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Modules Needed
A Lightbox brings content to the user's attention.
To decide which Lightbox module you should use for your Drupal project, think about what you will use it for. Do you need to handle images and video? HTML? Integration with other modules? Various browsers?
Once you choose one to meet your needs, we’ll show you how to go about using it.
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In this lesson we take a look at an extremely useful tool for communicating with the Drupal community (and many other Open Source communities as well). We will find out what IRC is, why you would want to use it, how to get connected, and some basic guidelines and tips for talking with people on IRC. We'll also explain what the IRC bot, Druplicon, is and how you can use it.
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In this lesson, we’ll take a look at how to modify the HTML output from Views, explore some of the default templates that Views provides, and learn about the various permutations of names we can give our template files to override output for everything from a large set of Views to a single field on a single View. We’ll also discuss the difference between displays, styles, rows, and fields when it comes to theming a View.
Area handlers are used in the header, footer and empty text areas when creating a View. In this lesson, we’ll walk through creating our own area handler that can be placed in the footer to provide a summary of all the rows in our View.
In this lesson we show how everyone can help with the Drupal.org documentation. We take a quick look at some of the links and information that is available to everyone with a Drupal.org account, and then we dive in to make our first edit to an existing page. We run into Drupal.org's spam protection, so we also walk through getting ourselves on the no spam list for the site. After we complete our edit, we then see how to add our own new handbook page, by creating documentation for a contributed module, which doesn't have a page yet. We finish up by creating an issue in the module's issue queue, to get a link to our new page added to the module's project page. You'll see us use the Drupal.org issue queue in this video. For more detailed information about that, see our Getting Started in the Issue Queue video.