particulars

Having an understanding of how your code is read and then rendered by the browser can suddenly give you a moment of clarity. Give it a try:

How Browsers Work: Behind the Scenes of Modern Web Browsers

Views… what can I say? This module is amazing and scary and confusing.

The project page for Views is rather enlightening if you skip the first two paragraphs and anything about Drupal 7 and go straight for the following list:

You need Views if:

• You like the default front page view, but you find you want to sort it differently.
• You like the default taxonomy/term view, but you find you want to sort it differently; for example, alphabetically.
• You use /tracker, but you want to restrict it to posts of a certain type.
• You like the idea of the ‘article’ module, but it doesn’t display articles the way you like.
• You want a way to display a block with the 5 most recent posts of some particular type.
• You want to provide ‘unread forum posts’.
• You want a monthly archive similar to the typical Movable Type/Wordpress archives that displays a link to the in the form of “Month, YYYY (X)” where X is the number of posts that month, and displays them in a block. The links lead to a simple list of posts for that month.

Which, essentially, means that everyone needs the Views module to make Drupal display your content how you want.

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Taxonomy is an extremely flexible and excellent tool to organize the content of your site, but it can sometimes be a confusing sort of mind game. There are so many ways to use taxonomy to make site sections, categories, tags, and distribute permissions to the content creators that its hard to get a grasp on how to exactly DO it.

Lets say you have a content type of Project that adds projects to a Portfolio of someone’s work. and you need to organize this work according to type, like “print” or “web” it can all be done with Taxonomy.

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There are some great (but complicated) ways to create menus in Drupal, but, initially, if you need to get a site out and don’t have time to mess around with Views to create that super awesome content aware menu of your dreams, then you could always use Drupal’s stock menu system.

There are a few reasons not to use the stock Drupal menu system that are of note:

• They are confusing and can leave a perfectly good piece of content drifting out somewhere difficult to find where it doesn’t belong.
• Not automatic. One can publish a page and have no links to the page anywhere on the public facing site.

But, there are also some really good features of stock Drupal menus:

• Easy item ordering according to business needs
• Menu items can be anything linkable. Not restricted to

So, with all of that in mind, lets make menu out of Primary Links.

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Recently, I’ve been tutoring friend of mine on the ways of Drupal. (Tall order, I know, but I’m up for a challenge.) He has had plenty of experience using a pre-configured version of Drupal, but wanted to learn how to make a site from a fresh install.

I suggested using the Acquia distribution of Drupal for several reasons:

• A free version of MAMP was already installed and configured running a multi-site installation of Pressflow Drupal and I didn’t want to screw around with those settings with a fresh install of Acquia.
• It is available in a stack installer that can run parallel to his current development environment with easy to use multi-site capabilities with a management GUI
• Acquia Drupal comes with all of the basic modules (such as CCK, Views, and Administration Menu) that one needs to create a site without really having to dig around and discover the good modules on your own.

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