Drupal Core Modules ( Drupal 6 Introduction - Part 2)

/*--- holy mAcar00ns!! --- */

Rough and tumble notes from:

BUILDING ONLINE COMMUNITIES WITH DRUPAL, PHPBB, AND WORDPRESS, 2006 Douglass et al.
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Chapter 3 - Using the Drupal Core Modules
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These all come with the standard install

Aggregator Module
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aggreagtes rss feeds

having problem fetching some RSS feeds:

HTTP request status Fails
Your system or network configuration does not allow Drupal to access web pages, resulting in reduced functionality. This could be due to your webserver configuration or PHP settings, and should be resolved in order to download information about available updates, fetch aggregator feeds, sign in via OpenID, or use other network-dependent services.

hmmm.it's funny how it works for jessica's blog only

http://drupal.org/node/222454

http://drupal.org/node/227791

i guess we'll have to figure tha tout later. but being able to grab rss feeds like that is really cool.

the only thig is that it doesn't turn it into nodes apparently.

okay managed to put a picture into a post but a clunky way of doing it. uploaded and then manually linked it in, but it's brittle because we used an absolute path.

okay tried this and it worked:
This is a test of putting a picture in a page.



had to enable uploads by the way to make that possible. looks like everyting is a module that needs to be enabled.

the book mentions an Archive Module but nowhere to be seen here.

Block module is also apparently no longer something that can be turned off or on. doesn't appear on our page, so i think it's just a part of core now.

Blog Module
----------
other blog modules
- trackback module
- blog theme module
- blogroll module

i'll ignore BlogAPI module for now

Book Module
-----------

very important stuff that one should know before one gets into the API

why isn't admin a role? i want stuff to be shown only to admin but it doesn't let me do that.

hmmm Books are a way of creating hierarchical pages. i suppose it may be easier to do it this way then any other way...

they don't have parent pages? in the normal page creation process?

i guess that wasn't an option before. okay. so you basically need to use book module in order to get the sort of hierarchy you have in wordpress for free.

intrersting. but once you cenable the module, the book option (hierarchy) seems to appear in all the content types.

you get pseudo-pagination out of it: previous, next, up

showing or hiding author is done via theme configuration

book module comes with a block that you can activate

he says users can enable their personal contact form in their account section but i dont' see that

it's actually under Site Building/Contact forms/settings

Forum Module
----------
Administer/Content Management/Forums

in order to do containers, organize, etc.

notice the set of icons that are used. by providing your own (using the same name) they willbe used in place of the default.

6 available icons:
-closed (comments disabled)
-default
-hot (comments and replies exceeds threshold set on forum config page)
-hot-new (hot and user hasn't viewed it)
-new
-sticky


Forum categories:
- listed in taxonomy like any other vocabulary
- it's possible to allow other content types to use the same vocab as the forum

Help Module
------
- gathers up each module's help and puts it at admin/help
- take a look at Help Edit module

Legacy module
------
- redirects pages for old versions of drupal to new pages

Locale Module
----
- authenticated users can change language
- affects built-in text
- for multilingual sites, use in combo with Internationalization module

drupal at time of writing had 30 languages

i'm skipping the rest of the translation stuff p76-79

Menu Module
---------
- can add pages to menus directly at page creation
- expanded means always show subitems (default is to show only if clicked on)
- new menus will be lised as block on block page
- can always add content to any menu at content creation time
- beware reset button. it will restore to original site, your custom menus will be lost

http://localhost/drupal/admin/build/menu/settings

he doen't say anything about dropdown menus. we still can't see any dropdown menus maybe try some diffterent thiemes and see what happens.

Node Module
-------
- common set of services to all node types

Page and Story module
----------------
- pages and stories nearly indistinguishable
- could use both jsut to create different settings for difft kinds of users (ie pages need moderation, etc.)

don't confuse with book!

Path Module
-----------
- SEO friendly - semantic urls (no node/2 etc)
- need to change permission for user to allow creating url aliases
- can't do absolute urls or links to other sites

what are the implications though? an alias basically means two urls pointing to the same place. sounds like google would penalize that.

but simple way to get rid of hte nodes. pretty cool. it's both powerful and sort of cumbersome because its not generatd automatically. so you haev to type it in by hand which can be inconvenient but it's also poewrful because you can have it named whatever you want. but problems will come if it's not unique. i suppose it will return an error. let's try that.

yeah it returns an error saying the path is already in use.

so which path does it use when you create a new node by default. if it puts hte node teaser on the front page, which url does it use to point to the article? the node or the alias?

it uses the alias. nice! and you can also arbitrarily create urls like shows/little_shop_of_horrors.html

again the url doesn't correspond to the file system, so that's cool. you can do whatever taxonomy you want then.

but if you go to http://localhost/drupal/shows you'll get a 404

so i think maybe you can create an aggregate page of shows somehow and put it that URL. how do you do that? you know you basically want a list of all the shows to go to that url.

all the shows. how do you get a list of all the shows?

you can get specific categorys of shows like comedy via taxonomy:
http://localhost/drupal/taxonomy/term/4

but how do you get shows. hmmmm...

besides doing it manually i mean. you could create a page and assign it to that URL presumably and then make that page execute PHP code (after enabling that module). that's fine that would work. but i would think that ther emight be some way to do it interlaly. to get all shows. yeah you could. you could do taxonomy for shows.

http://localhost/drupal/taxonomy/vocabulary/3

doens't work. so it doesn't seem to allow listing by vocabulary but it alows you to list by terms interesting.

i need to ask about that.

how do you get all shows? if shows is the vocabulary. i dont' think writing your own PHP and going to the database is the easiset or ideal way to do it but that's possible.

there must be a better way. i'm sure there is.

you can also create aliases for internal drupal paths to administrative sections etc.

Pathauto Module
------------
- makes auto URLs for nodes, categories, users even when not specified
- fully configurable patterns for urls

Ping Module
------
- pingomatic.com

Poll Module
-------------
- active or closed
- lilke any other regular content node -- can get promoted to front page
- better to use the block (Most Recent Poll)
- to prevent dupes, recommedned that only authenticated users can vote
- one vote per IP

Profile Module
------------

one of hte bad things about drupal is that it's hard to use, administer. it's like you enable a module and hten where do you goto configure it? i just enabled profile module but can't find the configuration page.

http://localhost/drupal/admin/by-module

that's the location not on a menu apparnetly. that was just al ink found on hte module page.

okay the profile module looks the most complicated so far of all the modules. let's see if we cna fonfgure this.

the other interesting thing i should note is that IE doesn't display the favicon for some reason.

actually not hard to set up. but we did one field that was homepage but when it renders in the profile page it doesn't show up as a link. so wonder how we can change that.

can be done via javascript but not ideal.

but othwerwise very nice module. highly configurable.

the url is because i didn't use the URL field. so have to use the URL field.

very nice. it has brwoser by tagging feature like flickr, etc. very nice.


the thing i don't undrstand here is hte visibility. what are 'member list pages?'

Search Module
---------
- pretty sophisticated
- more relevant appears higher
- h1 more weight than h2, etc.
- internal links boost position, etc.

there's also a search page:
http://localhost/drupal/search

need to run cron to index

Statistics Module
----------------
- counte rfor every node
- referring URL for every hit
- IP
- username

- enable and configure it!

do'nt ban yourself!!

Throttle Module
---------
- prepares for high load
- which blocks or modules to shut off at high load
- two possible triggers
- number of anonymous users
- number of registered users online
- monitors sessions table for number of people

tyer's also a
Auto-throttle probability limiter:

not improtant right now

but once you enable throttle, each module or block can be set to throttle (turn off) on high load via the block page or module page

Tracker Module
-------
- track recent posts (adds 'track' to profile page -- shows what they created/edited recently)
- adds 'recent posts' to navigation menu
- no config necesary

Upload Module
---------
- first uploaded file is enclosure in rss feed
- suitaible for podcasts
- when you don't want the file to be visible:
- when yhou're using Inline Module so that you just link to the file from your post or whatever
- use Img_assist Module to put inline images in posts

Watchdog Module
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- keeps track of logs
- size of watchdog table has significant influence on site performance
- dont' keep longe rhtan necessary
- discard occasionally

Labels: cms, drupal, drupal6, php

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