Giving Drupalize.Me a New Coat of Paint
Blog postAs some of you may know, we're in the process of upgrading the cuddly panda that we all know and love as Drupalize.Me to Drupal 7. There will be other blog posts giving a better insight into the actual upgrade but, I'll be talking about what that means for the design of the site.
In this lesson we take the approach of using the Organic Groups Extra module to spruce up our team pages with relevant content. By itself Organic Groups doesn't do a whole lot to display either a useful groups page or the relationships between a piece of content and the group itself. Instead it relies on modules that are geared towards that specific task like Panels or Organic Groups Extras. Joe shows us how we can use OG Extras to make the group page itself a bit more useful by displaying some additional information like a list of group members and the list of all the content that's been posted in that group.
Additional resources
In this lesson Karen will talk about how to use Panels and Panelizer to display group content in various ways. She will first demonstrate how to use the built-in features that come with Organic Groups to construct a basic group and group panel. She explains how this can be done using the features module. She then demonstrates using the new Panelizer module to create a system where every group can have its own layout and content. Note: Karen enabled the Features module then separately enabled the OG Example feature, which has a dependency on Panels and other modules so basically Features enabled them. If you actually enable that feature on the modules page it will tell you that panels is required and asks to install it. Karen however enabled the Panels modules via the Features admin page.
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Wowza and the Leap Second
Blog postAn interesting thing occurred last weekend on Sunday morning. Really, really early. A leap second was applied to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and Linux admins everywhere were suddenly awakened as their servers started pegging CPU's and setting off alarms. Oops. Looks like there is a bug in the current Linux kernel that caused a bit of havoc. You can read all about it, but I'll leave understanding the details of the bug as an exercise for those of you that are interested in those kinds of things.
In this lesson Joe Shindelar covers all aspects of Organic Groups and access control. He describes how Drupal's access API allows for Organic Groups to function in such a way that certain groups and/or pieces of content can be hidden from users that don't have access to it. He demonstrates how you can add fields to groups and/or content types to have fine control over this access control on an individual basis versus the defaults. He also demonstrates how you can switch this control at any time to give a user access to content they may not have had access to at time of publication.
Additional resources
In this lesson, Joe Shindelar goes over all the possible permissions with Organic Groups. He explains the differences between the regular core permissions, and how Organic Groups can override these to give the proper user experience of grouped content. He will show how this affects each role in a group and how to manage those roles.
Note: In Chapter 8 ("Organic Groups Permissions") there are several blocks (Group details, Create content, etc.) and the "groups" tab in the main menu that were not introduced in Chapter 7. These blocks and the new tab are explained in Chapter 10. Sometimes we don't record tutorials in the same order they appear online, which creates discrepancies. This is what happened here—sorry!
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Junebug Brings Interactive Transcripts
Blog postOur latest launch, the Junebug sprint, brings us some changes and enhancements to the closed-captioning we introduced last month. We now have interactive transcripts and the ability to display translations. We also made a little interface tweak for our closed-captioning.
Interactive transcripts
In this chapter Karen Stevenson will cover getting some content and users into our site. She will achieve this using the Devel module, with a few tips and tricks because of all the references Organic Groups uses to work its magic. The reason we need this content is so we can understand how all the components of a group work. From a manager to member, and individual content, each has a different role in an Organic Group.
Additional notes:
Around 3:22 a new Announcement was made with Cardinals as a selectable option in the Team field. That option only appears if, as admin, you explicitly join the Cardinals group.
Additional resources
In this chapter, Joe Shindelar goes over all the necessary modules needed to get organic groups up and running. He also discusses that there are two methods using two different modules for viewing group information and content.
Additional resources
In this chapter Karen Stevenson explains all the pieces that make up an Organic Group content type. Show explains how organic groups adds the necessary fields to make this happen while demonstrating the necessary settings when building your content types. She also covers the content type used for group content as it is different than the group itself. To start the video off she goes over install the necessary modules for the first part of this series.
Note: There have been significant changes to Organic Groups since this lesson was made. Though we would like to revisit this series to update it, we have no current schedule to complete that. The best place to figure out what has changed and why, would be the Organic Groups issue queue on Drupal.org (http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/og).
Additional resources
In this video series Karen Stevenson, Michelle Lauer, and Joe Shindelar take a look at the Organic Groups module for Drupal 7. The series starts from the basics, goes through the various required modules used to build a site with Organic Groups, and then gets in depth with creating groups, adding content to groups, and dealing with group membership. In addition to the basics of creating groups, the series also takes a look at the various settings related to both access control and permissions and how you can combine them to create private and public groups. Next we show you how to use the OG Extras module to display more information on the main group page and then how to use the Panels module to display group content and other advanced Fields and Views configuration related to OG. This video assumes that you understand the basics of content, fields, and Views in Drupal. If you need a refresher on these topics, consider reviewing these other tutorial series:
Note: There have been significant changes to Organic Groups since this lesson was made. We use the 7.x-2.x-dev version from May 2012, or the equivalent of 7.x-2.0-alpha3, in our lessons. Though we would like to revisit and update this series, we have no current schedule to complete that. The best place to figure out what has changed and why, would be the Organic Groups issue queue on Drupal.org (http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/og).
Additional resources
In 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 video Karen will show you how to create a date pop-up on your calendar, using the ColorBox jQuery plugin. She shows how to integrate the plugin with Drupal with the Colorbox module and then how to configure this with the Calendar module. Additional notes: The default display is to show the entity label. You will need to change this to show the complete entity otherwise you'll get a popup with no information in it.
Additional resources
In this video Michelle will give us a tour of our example site from the manager perspective, so we can see how you manage a group. We'll look at the extra administrative rights they have for the group, including accepting new members. We also talk about roles and permissions within a group, and briefly discuss the difference between permissions and access control.
Although the video uses the "dev" version of Organic Groups, there has since been a stable release of the 2.x branch.
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
Drupalize.Me trainers Kyle Hofmeyer and Michelle Lauer will be bringing Drupal learning to you live in Providence, RI on June 22! As part of Drupal Global Training Day, we'll be hosting a full-day Intro to Drupal workshop from 10am-5pm at the Lullabot Activity Center in Providence, Rhode Island.
We'll be covering:
- An overview and background of the Drupal project
- Basic terminology
- How sites get built with Drupal
- Finding your way around the community
- A live site-building demo
In this video Michelle takes a look at our example site, My Town Sports, from a member's perspective. We can review a list of groups, subscribe and unsubscribe, and create content for a group we belong to.
Additional resources
Time to Upgrade!
Blog postThis week our team got together and started to focus on a new project: upgrading our site to Drupal 7. Drupalize.Me was originally built on Drupal 6 back in 2010 and the site is running very well, but we’d love to move up to Drupal 7. Aside from just playing with the great new features in Drupal 7, we also want to take a fresh look at the site and clean up a few things.
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.