In this chapter, we'll walk through some of the best practices for filling out a stock Drupal site so that you can start to have some dummy content generated by different users and tagged with different taxonomy tags. We'll step through creating content with the devel generate module, and then do some other site preparation tasks such as creating some menu items and adding a shortcut link to the performance page so that you can quickly access the clear cache button.
Additional resources
This screencast presents a way to help manage article promotions, separate content types used for promoting articles, providing more flexibility than standard teasers. The screencast shows how to have promotion nodes being published, unpublished and deleted in sync with the articles they belong to. Topics covered are:
- Reacting on the node deletion event.
- Using fetch entity by property to load a list of all relevant promotion nodes.
- How to have the loaded list unlimited in length.
- Using the delete entity action.
- How to call rule components from a reaction rule.
- Why it might be a good idea to have actions in separate components when acting on node updates.
- Cloning rule components.
- Publishing and unpublishing nodes.
Additional resources
Rules guide (Drupal.org)
This screencast shows how to set up Rules to allow comment writers to be notified when replies are posted to their comments. It covers:
- Adding a checkbox to the comment form, turning on or off reply notifications
- Sending e-mails to the comment author when new comments are posted
- Not sending e-mails when replying to own comments
- Some words about checking “entity has field” on the correct entity
Additional resources
Rules guide (Drupal.org)
This screencast shows how to set up Rules to allow node authors to – optionally – receive e-mail notifications when comments are posted to his or her content. It covers:
- Adding a checkbox to user accounts, turning on or off comment notification
- Sending e-mails to a node author when new comments are posted
- Not sending e-mails to the author if he/she was the one writing the comment
Additional resources
Rules guide (Drupal.org)
Calendars with Drupal 7
CourseIn this video we take a look at several advanced configuration options when working with calendars. We start off by talking about the various pager options available and how that works with AJAX, and then we explain how you can keep track of the current date that someone is viewing the calendar in as they move through the various displays. We wrap up by covering three methods for working with caching to improve your site's performance, as calendars can be intensive, depending on the site. We'll discuss caching with the Entity cache module, using the Date API date caching, and then review using views caching.
Additional resources
In this presentation Karen walks us through the basic concepts of the Organic Groups 7.2 module, also known as OG. She looks at what OG can do for us, explains how it works in Drupal 7 with entities, and does a brief comparison of OG with a multi-site installation.
Additional resources
In this video we will look at overriding a theme function instead of working with the template files. We will be modifying the breadcrumb using theme_breadcrumb(). to do this we'll use the Theme Developer module to help us find what we're looking for, and then we'll walk through how to override.
Additional resources
Theme Developer module (Drupal.org)
960 Robots
Provides a overview presentation for how Drupal's menu system takes care of incoming requests via the index.php. Then it walks through the process of implementing a simple module that hooks into Drupal's menu system at the path of /magic.
It then executes a page callback function of menu_magic_basic(),
which outputs some simple markup text.
Additional resources
In this video we will see how we can create our own preprocess function for a theme function (not just templates). We're going to use this to display the user's full name on the site wherever the the username would normally appear. We start by creating a full name field, and then show how to get this working on our site.
Additional resources
In this video we will look at how to add CSS and JavaScript to our site using drupal_add_css()
and drupal_add_js()
. We will also show using these functions to conditionally add the CSS and JavaScript, within our page preprocess function.
Additional resources
In this video we'll see how we can create our own template suggestions. We'll do this in our node preprocess function to create a new node template that will be used depending on the day of the week.
Additional resources
In this lesson we will cover what is necessary to use repeating/multiple dates on a single event. After getting the proper modules installed and a content type to handle repeating dates, we show you how the calendar module handles this out of the box. We go even further and explain how everything is setup to give you a better understanding of all the settings necessary to make this happen.
Additional resources
In this lesson we will configure the day view even further by adding our taxonomy field as a method of grouping events. This will give us the ability to show events grouped together in a column to further organize our day view.
Additional resources
In this lesson we will cover customizing the day and week view. Sometimes your events may have the same or close to the same start times, this can start to make your calendar look very complicated. We will show you how to utilize the overlapping feature and all of the settings to make the display easier to look at for your viewers. We will also discuss how to bring focus to certain time periods and some more advanced settings pertinent to the week and month view.
Additional resources
In this lesson we add some usability to our calendars with color-coded striping. You get to pick which colors represent which taxonomy terms so that each calendar event is marked. Alternatively, you can stripe your calendars by content type. We also add the Legend block to our sidebar that shows what each color represents.
Additional resources
Do you find that you have too many events on one day and that it is skewing the look and feel of your calendar? You have options! You can set a maximum number of events that display per day and include a 'more' link that takes you directly to the View of that specific day. Does that inconsistency bother you? You can make the link appear for any day that has any number of events.
Additional resources
In this lesson, we cover how to customize the Month and Week view of the calendar. The primary concept in this video deals with the different ways of displaying an event that covers multiple days and how it is outputted to the screen.
Additional resources
In this lesson we show you how to add an iCal feed to a new calendar and an existing calendar. We cover the required modules for an iCal display as well as the configurations necessary for it to work properly. We also show you what an iCal feed looks like and how you can remove certain fields from it.
Additional resources
In this chapter we will cover utilizing some built in blocks that come with the calendar module. We'll show you how to setup and configure a mini calendar block as well as an upcoming events block.