Drupal Care Package

Overview

This care package collects some useful resources either created by previous assistants or from the Internet.

Adding & editing contents

Adding & editing contents are the most basic uses of Drupal

• Video tutorial
• Adding content on Drupal 7

Create your own content types

Sometimes the original content types cannot fulfill your all requirements, you may want a new content type to reach your expectations. For example, you may want to create a FAQ page, which should contains several FAQ entries. Thus you can create a new custom content type "FAQ", which has "Question" and "Answer" fields instead of "Title" and "Body".

• Create custom content type - This tutorial lists the procedures you need to create a custom content type.
• Creating News Items and a News List - An example of creating a "News" custom content type

Show content on a page in the way you want

When you have your own content type, the next step is to show entries of the content type on your website. Drupal module "View" is a handy tool to manage this issue.

• First of all, make sure that the View module is already enabled.
  • Management Menu(on the top of the scree) -> Modules -> Views
  • Make sure that "Views UI" and "Views" are enabled
• A totally beginner tutorial to Views for Drupal 7
• Video Tutorial

"I want a few pictures on the left one third of the screen and articles on the right two third."

Then you have to use the more advanced "Panels" module.

• A series of video tutorials that teach you how to create more customized pages.
• Creating a new front page - Yes you can customize your front page too.

Organize your site with Menu

It's not a good idea to put every thing on one page.You need to redirect website visiter to different pages.

Basic content types

• Go to the editing page of a content to which you want to add a menu link
• Scroll down and you will see a tab of the bottom block called "Menus settings", click it
• Check the "Provide a menu link"
• Fill out the "Menu link title" and "Description"(optional)
• Choose a "Parent item" for the menu
• Don't choose anything other than "<Main menu>" unless your theme supports drop-down menu

Views or Panels

• Views:
  • Management menu -> Structure -> Views -> /view/ you want to edit -> Edit -> Page Settings -> Menu
• Panels:
  • Management menu -> Structure -> Panels -> Manage Pages -> /page/ you want to edit -> Edit -> Settings -> Menu

Organic Groups

Overview

Organic Groups module can "Enable users to create and manage their own 'groups'. Each group can have subscribers, and maintains a group home page where subscribers communicate amongst themselves. They do so by posting the usual node types: blog, story, page, etc. A block is shown on the group home page which facilitates these posts. The block also provides summary information about the group. Groups may be selective or not. Selective groups require approval in order to become a member, or even invitation -only groups. There are lots of preferences to configure groups as you need."

Tutorials

Quick introduction video. It has more clips about OG, but most of them are not free.

Some helpful tutorials for starters

• Organic Groups: Social Networking for Drupal The illustrations in this tutorial may contain different interfaces, but the procedures are the same.

• Organic Groups for Drupal 7

Example

ERI's Cosmos web is utilizing OG to manage its "Networks"

More

• Organic Groups

Theming

Tutorial