Milk's Site  -  Milk's Wiki


Drupal And The Forest

A record of how we set up Drupal 6.9 for The Forest.

Basic initial setup

Firstly, the administration module is really handy for accessing admin functions. Install and enable it.

Enabling core modules;

  • Aggregator - Enables RSS feeds
  • Blog - Enables blogging features
  • Contact - Enables contact pages, handy for feedback
  • Content translation - Enables users to translate content
  • Locale - Enables translation of interface and the content translation module
  • Path - Enables the changing of node URLs
  • PHP filter - Enables protection from dodgy php code
  • Ping - Enables trackback/pingback
  • Poll - Enables polls
  • Profile - Enables user profiles
  • Search - Enables searching of content
  • Statistics - Enables stat logging
  • Syslog - Enables logging of system events
  • Throttle - Enables protection from spam, stupid users, etc
  • Tracker - Enables logging of changes by users
  • Trigger - Enables triggered events
  • Upload - Enables uploads by users
Administration - Site configuration

From scratch, the only really interesting settings section is 'Site information' where you can set the name of the site, primary e-mail contact, slogan, etc.

Also, worth changing the 'Image toolkit' value of JPEG quality to 95% for a better looking site, changing the timezone to Europe/London and date format from from MMDD to DDMM in 'Date and time', and enabling both logging options and setting the length to '16 weeks' in 'Access log settings'.

To install

???? = not done yet

======= Theme & looks =======

URL aliases - Set the 'Default path pattern' to '[title-raw]', blog to 'news/[month]/[mm]/[dd]/[title-raw]', event to 'event/[title-raw]', image to 'image/[title-raw]'. Change the Update action to 'Create a new alias. Redirect from old alias.'

Martin M worked on the Colourise theme to make it more like the vision Chris had. Milk is going to hack this some more to get the layout working better.

Trying to disable all the post information in the 'Display post information on' section of the global theme preferences doesn't work. Hmmm.

======= General =======

  • Views - Views (specific data feeds) and Views UI (admin editing) are required for using views.
  • Panels - Panels (specific arrangements of nodes and views), Views panels (allows views to be used)
  • ???? Content Construction Kit (CCK) - Custom forms.
  • Ctools - Extra core shizit for modules. Required by Panels.
    • plus the Delegator module
  • Token - Required by a number of modules (pathauto, ubercart, etc). Also, enable Token actions.
  • Trash - Provides a trash area for deleted items to be undeleted from.
  • Advanced help - Provides extra help info for Views, etc.
======= Events =======

  • Event - Allows you to create event nodes. Dev release for D6
See also content types.

For the event poster/flyer view on the front page, I added a field to the Event content type with the label 'Poster or flyer', the field name of 'field_posterflyer' and the type 'Image'. I then created a new view called 'Event_images', added the filters (how the view selects the content to be listed) 'Node: Published Yes', 'Node: Type = Event' and 'Event: Start Date > now' with the field (what is actually displayed) 'Content: Poster or Image linked to node'. Lastly I went to the front page 'Panel content' page and added the 'Event_images: Defaults' view into the right hand panel.

======= WYSIWYG =======

First I tried;

  • Wysiwyg API - Allows Wysiwyg editing of content.
    • TinyMCE - Editor package for use with Wysiwyg API.
There is an official image and file manager plugin for TinyMCE? but they are commercial. I tried using IMCE plus the patch attached to #115 on here to get it working with Wysiwyg/TinyMCE but this failed and is a major hack anyway. Though not as nice as IMCE, there are open source manager plugins are listed here, but none seem compatible with the Wysiwyg/TinyMCE method of using TinyMCE?.

So instead I installed;

Renamed the 'User-1' profile to 'Full access' and give it full editing rights to 'images', 'event-images', 'publications-images', 'records-images', 'php: return 'users/'.$user->name;' and 'users'. Also created a 'Limited access' profile and have it access the users folder with full rights and the communal folders with no delete or resize rights.

Added build/contact/add/* to global profile exclusion list.

======= Images =======

For an overview of Drupal image handling, see here. This needs to be sorted with the site still.

Change the image import folder to "sites/default/files/images/temp"

======= URLs =======

======= Shop =======

Enable ImageAPI?, ImageCache?, ImageCache? UI, ImageField?. Click the link to enable images in the UC admin page.

Country settings; disable US and Canada, import GBR.

Store configuration; Change 'Contact settings' to those of The Forest, set 'Format settings' to UK/metric and the date format to 'd/m/Y' and '(Do not display a message in the footer.)' on 'Display settings'.

Change the content type "Product' to not be published to the front page. Change the 'Catalog' vocabulary to 'Shop'.

======= Wiki =======

======= Users =======

  • ???? Privatemsg - Allows your site's visitors to send private messages to each other. D6 port postponed.
  • ???? Apply for role - Allows users to apply for a role and administrators to approve their application.
======= Blog and search =======

  • Google Analytics - Adds the Google Analytics web statistics tracking system to your website.
  • ???? XML Sitemap - Creates a site map in accordance with the sitemaps.org specification. In progress.
  • Trackback - Contacts posted blog entries via trackback.
Content types

  • Blog - Change to 'Blog/news'. Description "For posting Forest wide news, newsletters, etc. Will appear on the front page of the site.". Enable 'Move to trash' tab and image attachments.
  • Event - Change description to "For working group meetings, workshops, gigs, cleaning days, etc." (event repeating is on - when it is enabled, add "If the event is repeating, open the repeating section at the top (and the advanced section for more options)."). Also, enable image attachments, disable 'Promoted to front page' and enable translations.
User roles

  • Create 'admin', 'full content editor' roles.
  • Edit permissions for these roles - TODO STILL
Contact forms

In 'Site building/Contact form', .....

Menus

  • Moved 'Trash' below 'Create content'
Translation

Drupal 6 has an inbuilt content translation system. To enable this, each language to be translated to needs to be enabled in 'Languages'

Views and panels

Enable all the types of panel and view available.

Views: Enable the 'frontpage' view

Create a panel page. Insert the 'frontpage' and 'upcoming events' views.

Video



(C) MilkMiruku last change: March 30, 2009