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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While pondering the changes the MTA has been making to subway service I came across the following webpage and thought to myself “this deserves a long awaited blog entry”:
Does the above look familiar? Back in the day, when I was pulling myself away from tables and discovering this whole “floating” situation, I scratched my head about this one for a few hours. Being that it was way before Firebug could shed light on the boxes being created by my code, I added a 1 pixel wide black border around everything and then printed and inspected every last line of fresh new XHTML to see if I had somehow forgotten to close a tag. What could be wrong? It all looks like it should work… why does the outer container spring up to the top of the page like those window shades in cartoons?
When elements are floated, they seems to enter this whole other world of browser physics where you have to learn how to wrangle them back down to co-exist with reasonable browser physics. Well, it seems that, when floating divs (or anything), the containing box’s style must include {overflow:auto;} or some kind of overflow designation in order to remind the browser that the outer box should fully contain the floated content nested inside.
Well, look at that! Above, I used Firebug to preview the live site with the CSS overflow fix wrapping the outer #contentbox around the floated columns nested inside.
If you haven’t played around with the Firefox add-on Firebug, you are seriously feeling around in the dark. It allows you to inspect your code by pointing a clicking. You can discover where that one place is getting that one color by clicking on it and discovering the line number of the offending CSS. I don’t know what I would do without it.
