Drupal Ace

Drupal beginner documentation picking up steam

Drupalace — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:20:34 +0000

Documentation for the Drupal beginner? If you've heard that there's just too little of it, you've heard old news. As the Drupal express picks up more and more steam in the world of site development, tech authors are rolling out the titles to bring the newcomers on board.

As noted here and here on Drupal.org, our favorite CMS is really coming on to the non-techie "C-M-what?" marketplace with the release of Drupal For Dummies and Sams Teach Yourself Drupal in 24 Hours.

Drupal For Dummies

Sams Teach Yourself Drupal in 24 Hours

A "Dummies" title? That's a clear sign Drupal has arrived. Arrived... somewhere. Wherever it is that "Dummies" status indicates. And "in 24 Hours"? I don't think even Jack Bauer could go from zero to social networking site in 24 hours (and you can't just shoot that Drupal logo guy in the leg to speed things up; he hasn't got legs). But seriously, these books are just what many beginners will need to get off the ground and running with Drupal. Welcome, new books!

With these newbie-friendly releases on book shelves, I tried out something I've been meaning to tinker with for a while: creation of an Amazon.com "Listmania!" list. It's a Drupal for Beginners list, showcasing good newbie-oriented books. (List creation was simple and uneventful enough; not much more to say on that!)

There are yet more books on the horizon that I'll add as they come out; are there any already-released books that I'm overlooking?

Meanwhile, Drupal beginners, remember that there are already plenty of great resources for you online before you splurge on books. I link to my favorite newbie resources at Drupal for Beginners; give that a peek. Then there's my newbie-oriented admin manual EDAM (now fully updated for Drupal 6; time to add some new pages!). And there are resources all over the Interwebs, like the Drupal 6 Ultimate Community Site Guide (review). It's a great time for anyone to step up to Drupal!

Click here and read more!

Changing download method from Private to Public: Image problems solved (somehow)

Drupalace — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 09:11:25 +0000

In this earlier Drupal Question, I lamented how changing a site's Private download method to Public resulted in non-displaying images with wacky URLs. Well, the problem is solved... or at least, it's just not there any more. Why? Well, maybe you could help explain. See the link for the full description of the problem and the new solution-of-sorts.

No closure, just working images. I guess that will have to do.

Click here and read more!

More EDAM updates!

Drupalace — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 03:11:49 +0000

A happy New Year to all! And what could ring in a new year more happily than updates to the Easy Drupal Admin Manual?

Okay, lots. But still, it's not a bad thing, right?

EDAM pages under Terms, Vocabularies, and Taxonomy: "Tagging" Your Content and Menus, Links, and Paths: Navigating the Site are now updated for Drupal 6, with one long-absent item, Placing Menus on Your Pages, finally online. All with a nifty new menu for navigating both EDAM and STARDOM, thanks to the Advanced Book Blocks and jQuery Menu modules.

There's still more of EDAM to update, but things are coming along nicely. Look forward to more all-new content before long.

As always, please let me know of any corrections or improvements to be made to the content. If those pages do appear up to snuff, please send any newbie Drupal administrators to EDAM for an easy guide to simple site admin and content creation.

Click here and read more!

Updating Easy Drupal Admin Manual

Drupalace — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 00:50:31 +0000

The Easy Drupal Admin Manual (EDAM) is a manual for a class of user that gets overlooked by most documentation: the non-technical administrator or editor who isn't setting up a Drupal site, but just wants to create content and perform simple configuration on an existing site.

EDAM is finally getting a long-overdue updating for Drupal 6, too. So far, the changes are mostly tweaks to details of administration forms and some terminology; where simple admin and editing are concerned, the differences between Drupal 5 and 6 aren't great.

I did take the chance to clean up a spotty and repetitive few pages on using text editors and image editors, such as FCKeditor and IMCE. Those are now condensed into one page, Using Text and Image Editors. The overview there also tries to be general, rather than looking specifically at FCKeditor or TinyMCE alone; it's not possible to address in detail the infinite configurations of text editors and image editors and file browsers, and all possible versions there of, that might pop up on a Drupal site.

The updating is still in progress, reaching only the Organizing Your Content page so far. It should all be completed soon, after which new manual pages can come on board. If that'd be useful, please say so! And if you know any newcomers to Drupal who can make use of a fairly simple end-user manual, send them to EDAM.

Click here and read more!

Flexible WYSIWYG editing for Drupal

Drupalace — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:27:42 +0000

A shocking discovery for many a newcomer to Drupal is that a fresh installation offers no controls for styling text in node bodies, comments, or wherever else you might like to drop a boldface or a header.

Most of those stunned beginners eventually realize that this makes sense: Some users want no such text styling, or prefer the complete control of manual HTML tags. And for those who do want word processor-style editing controls, there is no universally-loved solution; there are many editor solutions floating about, each with its own strengths and fans. Drupal lets the administrator choose and install any of many favorites, including FCKeditor and Tiny Tiny MCE. That still irks some who want a built-in solution, but it's a good state of affairs for anyone not afraid of a little hands-on work installing a module and setting up WYSIWYG editing.

Click here and read more!

Checking out Amazon on Drupal 6, Part 2

Drupalace — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:53:20 +0000

Here's the second installment of my Amazon and Drupal experiments.

First, a note on a topic I mentioned, the recent requirement that Amazon affiliates go to aws.amazon.com to acquire a new Access Key ID and Secret Access Key: The Amazon module kindly warns you right on your main admin page if your Keys are incomplete or outdated. Here's the message I didn't spot when I was troubleshooting things on my own:

The Amazon API must be configured with an Access Key ID and an Amazon AWS Secret Access Key to function. Go to Amazon API Setttings.

Helpful! All right then, on to a new feature, Amazon Stores:

Click here and read more!

Review: Drupal 6 Ultimate Community Site Guide

Drupalace — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 02:35:04 +0000

How-to guide for a community site

Drupal 6 Ultimate Community Site Guide is an inexpensive (€5.5), 133-page ebook by Drupal enthusiast Dorien Herremans. It aims to help moderately new Drupal users bring community-oriented features to a site, via a book-length case study: the Drupal Fun site, where you'll find the book offered.

Drupal Fun's community features include basic member functionality (login, profiles), showcases, forums, shared AdSense, newsletter, user tags, user search, and content voting. It doesn't boast the shiny appearance of one of the fancier sites out there, so it's not surprise that the book doesn't delve into creation of awesome themes. Likewise, Drupal Fun's functionality comes mostly from commonly-used modules, with only a splash of manual code in blocks or elsewhere, not groundbreaking new features via heavy custom coding. But that simplicity makes the site valuable as a case study for users who want to enable those same community features despite still-modest Drupal skills.

Click here and read more!

Checking out Amazon on Drupal 6, Part 1

Drupalace — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:30:52 +0000

How can you easily add Amazon product links to a Drupal site? If you've been working with Drupal at all, you can guess the answer: There's a module for that!

That would be the Amazon module. Yet... How do you use that module? As noted in this forum thread, the module contains nearly no documentation, and I failed to find anything among the Drupal.org handbooks.

There's a little documentation on Drupal.org for the Amazon Store module but not for the Amazon module itself. This finding is repeated inside a comment at comment at Drupal Modules.com: "It doesn't have any documentation on how to use it but I found a lot out by visiting the issue queue and reading the user posts."

I'm trying to get Amazon working on another site, just a simple way to display some Amazon offerings alongside a node, or even an in-site "store". One solution, of course, is to paste Amazon code directly into nodes or blocks, but that's somewhat static; I'm interested in seeing what a module can do to improve upon that. Some problems and in-progress solutions:

Click here and read more!

Free Acquia hosting for Drupal non-profit sites

Drupalace — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 05:31:12 +0000

Drupal creator Dries Buytaert announced a generous offer from his company, Acquia:

Today, we are happy to announce that we'll start to provide free Acquia Hosting accounts to not for profit sites dedicated to promoting the adoption and usage of Drupal. For example, DrupalCamp websites and local Drupal user group websites would qualify for free Acquia Hosting. The program starts in October or November, but you can sign-up now if you have a site that qualifies.

Can't beat that! Check the announcement for details.

Click here and read more!

Note from the spam front lines

Drupalace — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 06:06:55 +0000

I currently use the Mollom service and complementary Mollom module for my site spam-blocking needs. Mollom's founders include Dries Buytaert, the creator of Drupal, so you know it's an excellent choice for our favored CMS. And I've been happy as a dozen clams with the service.

A kind reader informs me, though, that comments were being blocked here. Attempts to comment received the "try again later" message that Mollom returns when its servers are out of action. Testing commenting as an anonymous user, I confirmed the problem – yet my Mollom admin page was reporting that the Mollom service was functioning normally.

The cause of this oddity is something to track down. In the meantime, I changed my Mollom settings to allow commenting when this "server down" problem crops up, so commenting should work now for all. (If it now works too well for spammers too... well, we'll see. Currently, Mollom reports successful blocking of dozens of spam messages per day for this site.)

So if you have a comment on anything at all (including experiences with similar Mollom troubles?), please accept my apologies for any recent difficulties, and fire away. And if there's trouble again... I'd greatly appreciate your letting me know via the contact form, or just via email (info, and then that "at" sign, and then drupalace.com). Thank you!

A lesson for all fellow Drupal beginners: Whatever your policies on controlling spam, creating content (including comments), and so on, test those functions regularly. When user interaction seems particularly lagging, try some test actions as a typical user (whatever that means for your site – anonymous visitor, regular registered user, etc.). If your site is high-volume, you'll probably quickly spot problems (like an AWOL forum), or receive email from concerned (or angered?) users. But if your site is a smaller one, it's up to you to regularly test that comments, forums, CAPTCHAs, and so on are working as they should be.

Click here and read more!