After just completing my first Drupal theme created from scratch, it was a big learning curve trying to style certain aspects of the content, especially some of the Views generated content but that’s a discussion for another day. Wrestling with the different settings and style sheets included with modules took a bit of time and although it’s only a basic theme, I  was quite pleased with it. After completing this and fighting with the code to a certain extent, I was curious what changes would be made to theming in Drupal 7 after the involvement of Mark Boulton and the whole D7UX project.

I only downloaded the Drupal 7 Alpha at the weekend so not had much of a chance to have a really good look around but first impressions indicate that the code has been cleaned up a lot since Drupal 6 which should certainly make it easier for designers/themers to create beautiful and custom designs. I think one of the major things which has held Drupal back in comparison to other systems like WordPress and Expression Engine is the lack of high quality themes for Drupal, and there seems to be a barrier for non-developers within the Drupal community and a lot of designer v developer debates going on, but that’s for another time.

One of the best additions was the stark theme which is almost totally devoid of CSS which helps when installing modules to determine their included CSS and see the CSS easier. Having this is a great help as one of the things I found difficult at times was altering the module’s CSS and by removing this it will certainly make this process easier in development.

As a result of this, I’ve decided to alter it slightly and remove even the basic styling that it has and also conver this theme to HTML 5 in order to have as clean an install as possible for creating themes in the future. I’m hoping that once I’ve completed it I’ll be able to release it for others in the near future, which should give me incentive to make it as good as possible.

Drupal and WordPress are the two Content Management Systems I use regularly when developing sites, and as WordPress updates to 2.9.1, Drupal has recently released the alpha version of the upcoming Drupal 7. Having heard a lot about the progress over the last few months, and of the contribution to the D7UX project by Mark Boulton, I was curious to see what the alpha version would be like and yesterday I downloaded a copy to play with in a local environment and there are a few major noticeable differences from previous versions straight away.

Installation:

There are two install profiles to choose from, Standard and Minimal. There are subtle differences between the two profiles, with more modules enabled in the standard installation as opposed to the minimal option. The minimal profile begins with only 3 modules enabled; block, database logging and update manager whilst the standard profile has the majority of common modules enabled by default. Depending on the site purpose, I’d imagine that 90% of the time the standard profile would be appropriate however the minimal profile would be useful for small sites who have no need for a large number of features.

Overlay:

One of the biggest differences in Drupal 7 is the admin overlay screen, which places the admin options within a javascript overlay on the site.

Personally I could see the reasoning behind this option of providing a quick snapshot of the site, and by allowing customisation of the options available on the dashboard it could be customised to the site in use to provide the most common information quickly. However it’s not something I particularly enjoyed using and immediately visited the modules page to disable it and return to the “page” version of the admin screen (Although it took me a while to realise it was a module, but that’s probably just me!).

CCK Built-In:

Probably the two most common modules installed in previous Drupal versions was CCK and Views, and a large part of CCK is now installed as standard allowing the creation of custom fields and content types, giving Drupal more flexibility straight out the box. However, content types is listed under the structure area of the admin options and not in content as I first thought.

Images:

Image handling has been built into Drupal 7, and probably one of the most useful additions is the ability to add an image field to content types so that images can be associated or displayed with content. This is a particularly welcome addition for me as I was struggling with this particular problem only last week.

Options such as maximum dimensions file types and upload size can be configured, as well as the destination of any images uploaded.

Themes:

Having seen Garland far too many times for my liking, it’s good to see some new themes included into Drupal 7, the most welcome addition being the Stark theme, similar to the excellent WordPress theme Starkers by Elliot Jay Stocks. The stark theme is almost completely devoid of CSS making it an excellent starting point for theme creation and allowing a blank canvas.

On quick inspection it appears that a lot of the markup has been cleaned up and made more semantic but I’ve not looked properly at this as of yet to give a thorough review. However, this was badly needed as some of the previous markup generated was horrendous and made styling unnecessary difficult.

Updating:

The ability to update and install modules and themes direct from the admin interface is a welcome addition to Drupal 7, with the option to either upload via url or by browsing to the folder on the local machine. This is useful as it removes the barrier of ftp for site managers and moderators, however it would be useful to search the modules section on drupal.org and install automatically similar to the plugins in WordPress, however that may come and this is certainly a step in the right direction.

Overall:

Having only had a very brief taster of Drupal 7 so far it’s certainly an improvement over previous versions and the addition of Mark Boulton, Leisa Reichelt and their team to the user experience project was a major plus as the user experience is vastly improved, it’s not perfect but certainly a lot better than it was.

Having installed Drupal a fair number of times now, I’ve got into a routine of essential things that I run through for each and every project regardless of the details of that topics, things that are generic to any Drupal installation and thought I would share them here. These are the same steps that I go through each and every time, before adding the project specific modules and functionality etc.

1. Enable Clean URLs

Clean URLs removes the horrible “?q=” from the urls generated by Drupal when creating nodes, and makes the nodes easier to remember and more SEO friendly. When used with the path auto module it enables very clear and SEO friendly page paths.

2. Create an Admin Role

By default, Drupal is installed with two user roles, anonymous and authenticated users. This allows permissions to be set for visitors to your site and people who have registered to be a member. When the installation process is complete, you’re logged in as user 1 which is the only user with permissions to perform certain tasks such as running update.php and other admin tasks. It’s much more secure to create an a new role called adminstrator or something similar and grant it permission to do all the tasks that user 1 can do, and only log in as user 1 when running update.php etc. This also gives the opportunity to grant other users access to the administration pages whilst still maintaining control over the site.

3. Essential Modules

Like other CMS’, there are essential modules which are used on 99% of sites, regardless of the type of site. There are certain bits of functionality which are almost like an extension of core as they are used that often. The modules I find myself installing time after time include:

• CCK
• Views
• Admin Menu
• Page Title
• Path Auto
• Devel
• Advanced Help
• Date
• WYSIWYG & Editor

4. Install Themes

Like the Modules, there are themes which I install in every fresh Drupal project which are the RootCandy theme and Framework. RootCandy I use as my adminstration theme and for entering content on sites as it provides an excellent UI for this task and much better than the default Garland theme. As a designer, I like the Framework theme as a starting point for my custom themes as it strips out a lot of the styles and leaves me with a blank canvas so to speak from which to create themes.

5.Configuration

Once all these modules and themes are installed and enables, I always take the time to configure them all correctly as well as adding any other user roles required such as Editors, Forum admins etc. It’s much easier to set all these up right at the beginning before any content is added especially when configuring modules such as the page title and path auto modules.

With CCK and Views, I always have a plan written down of what content I require and the fields that will be needed as well as all the views which will need to be created before I begin implementing them within Drupal.

Does some of this look familiar? Do you have any other essential steps that you run through before creating a new Drupal project? Let us know in the comments below and we can all learn from each other.

Having recently upgraded to Drupal 6.14, and as I’m currently running my sites on 1and1 hosting, clean urls are not enabled by default so I have to manually enable them after installation. The easiest way to do this is follows:

1. Open your site’s .htaccess file
2. On line 75 change RewriteEngine on to become RewriteEngine On
3. On line 101 uncomment the RewriteBase /

Return to http://example.com/admin/settings/clean-urls and the option for clean urls should be available.

These instructions are correct as of Drupal 6.14 but may change in future versions

First off, this is my first post in a while and it’s all my fault – must do better!

Just a quick update for this post, as myprevious posts show I’m now finished university for the summer and am once again working at Reach Further here in sunny Leeds. It looks like a busy summer as things are going well at work, with plenty to do.

I’m also planning to brush up on my skills outwith work by attending events like DrupalCamp UK and also Future of Web Design in Glasgow. I do have other posts lined up over the next couple of weeks so will get back in the swing of posting on a more regular basis.