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Topic “musthave”
CCK
Keven likes movies. A lot. Almost an unhealthy amount.
Keven heard about Drupal and decided to create a web site where he could post reviews about movies he's seen in an effort to earn a few dollars in Google ad bucks to keep his movie-viewing habit at a high-level. So, he got himself a web host, installed Drupal and started posting reviews using the default "story" content type.
The attached screenshot shows an administrator view of a "client contact" content type that has additional fields for phone numbers, email addresses, and other information.
Stats
- Learning curve: medium
- Depth: way deep - so much so that many Drupal developers start designing a site by defining the various content types and fields needed
- Breadth: an entire eco-system of modules extend the capabilities of CCK by providing new field types, widgets, and other functionality
- See also: Link, Imagefield, Addresses, and Filefield
- Resources:
Admin Menu
What is more fun? Drilling down into your site's administrative area page-by-page or sticking needles in your eyes? Wait - don't answer yet; I'll give you a third option - how about memorizing Drupal's admin area URLs in an effort to avoid the dreaded page refresh? (all those guilty of the third option raise your hands - me included)
The Admin Menu module uses javascript and css to create a dynamic administrative menu bar at the top of every page on your site. You can decide which users can utilize the menu bar via the module's permissions. In addition to providing virtually all of the administrative links, it also has handy links for running cron, clearing caches, disabling developer modules, drupal.org, and accessing the "my account" page.
Stats
- Learning curve: none
- Resources:
Views
So, you want to build a content management system? They're all the same, aren't they? Admin screens, RSS feeds, Calendar, Contact form, the list goes on...
On the other hand, that makes me think of one area no framework agrees on... Lists! Drupal doesn't even have a built-in way of displaying a list of all nodes of type "X" to users.
Views is a universal API to let any user or module make a list of just about anything on your Drupal site: views comes with the ability to list all of Drupal's "first class objects":
- Nodes
- most views list nodes, and nodes have the most power and felxibility in a Drupal site
- Aggregator Items
- list stories in an RSS feed, sort them, filter them
- Comments
- maybe list all comments in moderation, or comments from users with the Editor role
- Files
- think: all files by one user, all MP3 files
- Node revisions
- Peek into the history of your content
- Taxonomy Terms
- Create custom navigation fast
- Users
- Combined with something like Userpoints, a list of folks who are active on your site
- Access Log entries
- find out where users are hitting your site, how they got there, and when
Stats
- Learning curve: steep
- Depth: incredible, especially once you consider relationships, attachments, AJAX and theme information
- Breadth: tons of add-on modules, tons of modules use views internally or add features to this module
- See also: simpleviews
- Resources:
