SYNAPSEINDIA SHARING

FEEDBACK ON DRUPAL
INTRO PART 2

ANONYMOUS USER

A (not-logged-in) site visitor is called a guest,

visitor or anonymous user.
Has a user-id (uid) of 0 (zero).
All anonymous users belong to the anonymous
user role (a role ID of 1) and have a set of
permissions assigned to them.

AUTHENTICATED USER

A user in drupal may belong to one or more roles.

Every registered user in Drupal belongs to at least the
authenticated user role.
Authenticated user role has a role ID of 2

ROOT ADMIN USER

The root user or root admin has the ability to do

anything on the site and is a special user.
The root user has a user-id (uid) of 1.
The root user does NOT have role-permissions to
set because they are effectively gods within
Drupal.

MANAGING PERMISSIONS

KEY concept: if you grant permission to an

authenticated user, it applies to ALL roles except
the anonymous user.
To grant a permission to everyone on a site, you
must grant the permission to both the
anonymous user and authenticated user.

MANAGING PERMISSIONS

To grant permission to only a newly created

dentist role, tick the permission on that role.
Leave all the other roles deselected.
If you grant to both the dentist role AND the
authenticated user role, you would be doing it
wrong. Drupal assumes you know this.

RECIPE: CHANGE SITE

INFORMATION
In Administer > Site Configuration > Site
Information:
Change the information to suit your site
following the help text.
Dont change the Default front page just yet.
Click Save configuration

RECIPE: CHANGE DATE AND TIME

In Administer > Site Configuration > Date and
Time:
Change the timezone to the correct time for
America/Denver (-0600 UTC)
Change the time formats
Click Save Configuration

RECIPE: CLEAN URLS

Clean URLs remove the ?q= from the location bar
in your web browser.
In Administer > Site Configuration > Clean Urls:
Tick Enabled
Click Save Configuration

CLEAN URLS ISSUE

If Clean URLs is an unchangeable option, then

there is a misconfiguration of the drupal site
hosting environment.

Contact your local IT support for assistance or

consult the drupal handbook for more info.

For the purposes of this demo, its not important

but it -is- important to enable later.

RECIPE: ADD A USER

Go to Administer > User Management > Users
Click Add user
Choose options.
Click Create New Account

RECIPE: ADD A USER

A user can also add themselves by registering, if

the root user has allowed this option.

Go to Administer > User Management > User

Settings

Tick Visitors can create accounts and no

administrator approval is required

Click Save Configuration

RECIPE: ADD ROLES

You will note that anonymous and
authenticated users are there by default,
undeletable.
Type in the box below the roles in the Name
column. Click add role. Thats it.

RECIPE: EDIT / DELETE ROLE

Click edit next to the role name.
Here you can change the name or delete the role.
Warning: If you click delete role, there is NO
confirmation. This can be bad.

RECIPE: ASSIGN MULTIPLE ROLES

TO USER

In Administer > User Management > Users:

Click the edit link under operations for a user

Under Roles, Tick an additional role you created.
You will notice authenticated user is locked.
Scroll to the bottom and click Save

RECIPE: ALTERING PERMISSIONS

Under Administer > User Management >

Permissions: you will see there is a permissions
column and role columns.

Scroll down to the user module section.

Tick change own username in the authenticated

user column.

Tick Save Permissions

RECIPE: BUILD MENU

Under Administer > Site Building > Menus:

Click Primary Links

On the Primary Links List Items page, click Add Item

In Path, type contact. In Menu link title, type Contact Form.

Change weight to 50 (drupal 6.x; 10 in drupal 5.x)

Click Save.

You will notice that Contact Form appears now on the far
right of your primary links. Click it to go to the contact form.

RECIPE: CREATE ABOUT PAGE

In the Navigation (left sidebar), click Create Content

Click Page under the content type listing.

In the Title, type About Us. In the body type This is my first drupal
page.

Expand the Menu settings fieldset.

In the Menu link title type About Us.

Change the weight to 49.

Expand the URL path fieldset and type about-us

Click Save

You should now see the About Us menu item in the Primary Link
navigation. Click it to go to this newly created node.

RECIPE: GET MODULES

Default Drupal installs can only do so much.

Go to http://drupalmodules.com to find a module
that supports what you are trying to do.
Do rely on the ratings here as they are tied to
download / popularity metrics from
http://drupal.org

RECIPE : CHANGE SITE (ADMIN)

EMAIL

Note: There are multiple places to change the email address for a
site root user administrator. You may have to dig around for
them in admin menu when logged in as the root user. Get
login info from Salesforce.

In site information : admin/settings/site-information

Site-wide contact form settings : admin/build/contact (edit

operation)

Mass contact settings (if used) :

admin/build/mass_contact/settings

Mail settings (different places, ex uses mimemail) :

admin/settings/mimemail

User register notify : admin/settings/register_notify

RECIPE: HALP! THE SITE IS

MESSED UP

If the login disappears and you cant login, go to

www.yourdomain.com/user or
www.yourdomain.com/index.php?q=user
If clean URLs is not working, substitute the first
forward slash (/) after the domain/host with
/index.php?q= without the quotes.
If all else fails, call Chris or Alex to build a GUI
interface in Visual Basic to track down the
perpetrator in realtime.

INSTALLING MODULES

Download (from drupal.or) and Unpack module

tarballs (*.tar.gz) files to the folder inside.

Upload the module folder to <drupal_root>

/sites/all/modules.

Create the modules and themes directories if

they are not there.

Go to Administer > Site Building > Modules : and

tick Enabled next to the module to enable it and
click Save Configuration

USING MODULES

A newly enabled module will add an

administration menu.

Go to that module and read the help before

changing anything.

Play around and learn its feature set.

Install the Advanced Help module to get more

verbose help with modules.

MODULES USED ON ALMOST EVERY

DRUPAL SITE

MOST USEFUL CONTRIBUTED MODULES

Administrati

CCK

Views

on

menu

SEO Checklist

String

Backup and

Overrides

Migrate

Path Redirect

Global

SEO Compliance
Checker

Pathauto

Search404

Meta Tags

Global GEOurl

Html Purifier

Page Title

Menu Attributes

New XML Sitemap

Site Map

Taxonomy
Manager

Token

Auto Assign Role

(+patch)

Ubercart

Date

Mollum / Spam

Captcha

WYSIWYG API

FCKEditor

IMCE

Chaos Tools +
Delegator

Panels

Actions

Triggers

Notify

Scheduler

Guestbook

Simplenews

Addthis / Diggthis/
Sharethis

Redirect

GoogAnalytics

MOST USEFUL CONTRIBUTED MODULES

FOR SEO
SEO Checklist

SEO
Compliance

Path + Pathauto

Path Redirect

Global GEOurl

Html Purifier

Global Redirect

Checker

Search404

Meta Tags

Advanced: Open
Menu Attributes

New XML
Sitemap

Site Map

Calais RDF
metadata WS

Page Title

MOST USEFUL CONTRIBUTED MODULES

(OLD) CCK
Administration
Views
String Overrides Backup and
menu

Migrate

SEO Checklist

SEO Compliance
Checker

Pathauto

Path Redirect

Global Redirect

Search404

Meta Tags

Global GEOurl

Html Purifier

Page Title

Menu Attributes

New XML Sitemap

Site Map

Taxonomy
Manager

Token

Auto Assign Role

(+patch)

Ubercart

Mollum / Spam

Captcha

WYSIWYG API

FCKEditor

IMCE

Actions

Triggers

Notify

Date
Addthis / Diggthis/
Sharethis
Advanced:

Advanced: Apache
Solr Search (we
cannot support yet)

Scheduler
Chaos Tools +
Delegator

Panels

Guestbook

Simplenews

GoogAnalytics

Advanced: Open
Calais RDF
metadata WS

Advanced: Devel
(danger)

Advanced:
PHPmailer /
SMTP Auth

A WARNING ABOUT USING FREE

AND LOW COST (DOWNLOADED)
THEMES

They are more difficult to customize than starting from scratch, but faster to use.

Some of the markup is not seo-friendly.

Some of the markup is over-engineered and messy; less is more.

Free or amateur / low-cost themes can be confusing if you look at the code; this may
impair your ability to learn drupal theming.

Some of the markup may be in tables or liquid layout and this may be hard to change
for your particular project, even if it looks nice to you.

Best practice suggests you either find a theme design and mimic its look-and-feel or do
the traditional photoshop mock up.

If you take someone elses theme, you dont know what youre going to get and this can
hinder your ability to develop

MOST USEFUL THEMES

Zen

(use starter kit to

960 grid based

themes

Garland

(use as admin theme)

subtheme)
Blarland an evil copy
of garland. Place it in
sites/all/themes and
change the name of
garland to blarland in
folder, and file names
esp in the info file.