Drupal Revisited

I've been having an interesting week or so outside work, getting back into the Drupal Content Management System which is written in PHP. My last real experience with it was years ago, Drupal version 6.x. I was doing volunteer work for a local community centre, who wanted a website for which they could edit content themselves without having to do any programming.

Of course, setting up a basic Drupal site and changing a few things is easy. Where I ran into trouble was the need to customise things like banners for different pages, file uploads and image placement. I had a lot to learn with the CCK (Content Construction Kit) and the Views module. Then I started studying for an I.T course and ran out of time, eventually having the give up on this volunteer work.

In the years since then, I've learnt a lot of .NET, Javascript, Python and PHP. I'm also properly familiar with Apache virtual hosts now. Now I'm better prepared to tackle the newish Drupal version 7, especially the PHP side of things. I've also been checking tables in PHPMyAdmin as I go, to see what Drupal is doing to the database.

I've been able to sign up for a developer account at drupal.org, then clone a copy from their git repository. It's been great reading through the Drupal source. I've also received a few emails for security flaw notifications. Thanks, Drupal guys!

Some things I've noticed which are different about Drupal 7:

• the CCK is now mostly incorporated into Drupal core
• CKEditor with the WYSIWYG configuration module seems to offer a good rich text editor
• hooks and APIs
• the Admin menu at the top (I like this anyway in v.6)
• the overall impression is that Drupal is now not so primitive, the modules are better and there is more documentation online.

My challenges now are to tackle the Views module (which I was never fully able to get to before), check out the hooks, and make a custom template or theme.

I always write down a bunch of notes as I do anything new, so here's a snippet of the most recent thing I did:

NOTES
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Download modules from: http://drupal.org/project/Modules
Token
PathAuto
Chaos Tools - Chaos Tools, Stylizer, Views content panes
Views
WYSIWYG

Download standalone CKEditor for Drupal from http://ckeditor.com/download. Unzip
mkdir sites/all/libraries
mkdir sites/all/libraries/ckeditor
-paste folder containing ckeditor.js into sites/all/libraries/ckeditor
-Go to Configuration > Wysiwyg profiles
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Till next time!