What is Drupal, exactly?

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2 What is Drupal, exactly? Drupal is an open source content management system used to build and manage websites. A content management system (CMS) is a set of procedures or functions that allow content to be manipulated collaboratively Open source means the people who wrote the code have allowed their work to be shared in order to be added to or improved.

3 Drupal Terms: Module Drupal is built of components called modules. It ships with a core group and can be modified, extended and enhanced almost endlessly. For version 6.x there are around 4000 modules available with more added every week. Examples: image galleries, WYSIWIG editors, cron task management, API integration.

4 Drupal Terms: Content & Nodes Content is what is added to the site: stories, events, blog posts, images, pages, polls, forums and comments. Each piece of content is assigned a node ID -- a unique identifier that appears in the path e.g.: The node ID is assigned sequentially and cannot be changed though it can be aliased

5 Drupal Terms: Blocks Additional information may be added or displayed in blocks which are located in sidebars, headers or footers on each page. Examples: ads, calendars, RSS feeds, links, forms, polls Blocks may be generated by modules or built by a site administrator.

6 Drupal Terms: Taxonomy Taxonomy is used to classify, describe and sort the content Drupal can accommodate everything from free tagging to complex hierarchical controlled vocabularies and thesauri You may associate a list with a specific content type or across all content types

7 Drupal Terms: Users Every site visitor is considered a user anonymous visitors have the user ID of 0; the administrator is user 1. All others are assigned sequential IDs Drupal also supports OpenID You can create different types of users and assign them permissions to access or manipulate parts of the site. Default users are admin, anonymous and authenticated (i.e. logged in).

8 Drupal Administration Almost all administration can be done through the admin panel using the web interface. The most common admin functions are user and content management, block and module configuration. Direct database access can be done through phpmyadmin on the server.

9 Drupal: Adding content Before you add anything you should know what kind of content you are adding. Book pages can be weighted to adjust their order; pages on their own can be added to books later. Each committee on the CUPE site has its own book Stories have no organization apart from the node and taxonomy order. Best used for news.

10 Drupal: Adding content 2 Events are time/date related and can be automatically shown on the calendar. Images added separately are generally expected to be displayed in a gallery; if you want to add an image to a story or page, it is easier to use the file attachment option and insert the image using the editor. Polls in the core module are simple multiple choice questions users can answer.

11 Drupal: Adding content 3 Blog posts are journal entries and are usually connected to a single user though any user can be given permission to have a blog. Forum posts (i.e. discussions) and comments (i.e. feedback) are more commonly created through user interaction

12 Drupal: Hands on (sort of) Walk through adding content : please see Adding and Editing CUPE 951 Web Content Go to Login as guesteditor, password lib209 This account has full admin privileges so you can snoop around and follow along. NOTE: this login is temporary and will be deleted following this class.

13 Drupal: inside 951.cupe.ca

14 Drupal: HELP! If you aren t the administrator, ask them first. On the Drupal project site handbooks and troubleshooting FAQ: Use your favourite search engine. Type in as much info as possible (e.g. error message), check forum posts especially; most of the time, someone else has had the same problem before you.

15 Drupal: Resources In addition to Drupal.org there are many sites that support Drupal developers. Search for modules and see peer-reviews: Free Drupal themes/templates: Find handy code snippets: