About Drupal

Drupal is a free open-source content management system (CMS) that is powered by PHP and MySQL. After much experimentation I believe that Drupal is the best open-source content management system available. WordPress is the only other open-source content management system that I use.

Why I prefer Drupal over WordPress

WordPress was designed for blogging. It can also be used as a lightweight content management system. For heavy-duty sites I recommend using Drupal instead of WordPress. Drupal has many advantages over WordPress like:

• Drupal has much better control of URL structure than WordPress
• Drupal is designed for community sites and has more functionality with user accounts and user-generated content than WordPress
• I think that Drupal makes a better multi-user blogging site than WordPress (unless you are using WordPress MU)
• Drupal Taxonomy is more flexible than WordPress categories
• Drupal's custom content types (e.g., CCK module) and Views open up many possibilities for building complex Web sites
• and much more...

Drupal's Learning Curve

Drupal does have a bit of a learning curve. I am focusing these tutorials on two aspects of Drupal: issues that beginners have trouble with, and Drupal SEO. Some of the tutorials here was originally written for Drupal 4.7, but they are generally updated for Drupal 5 and 6 as my time allows. If you have questions for me about what I've written, please post them in the comments or in our Webmaster Forum.

Drupal Book and Documentation

I highly recommend the excellent book Pro Drupal Development. Also the official documentation has a lot of good information and Drupal recipes.

More Drupal Tutorials

If you have a request for a tutorial on a specific aspect of Drupal, please post your request in our new Webmaster Forum, and I'll do my best to write a tutorial to cover your questions when I have time.

Drupal Hosting

I've tried running Drupal sites on many cheap hosting companies, including ones in the following list. I highly recommend using Site5 hosting for inexpensive Drupal hosting. This Drupal site runs on Site5 hosting and regularly handles several thousand visitors per day without problems.

Other cheap hosting companies that I've installed Drupal on:

• I've had problems with Bluehost and it's not my first choice for Drupal hosting. I think that Site5 offers more features.
• Dreamhost — I don't recommend using Dreamhost for Drupal hosting because in my experience my Drupal sites have run very slowly on Dreamhost. Also, Dreamhost does not offer good stats. Site5 includes awstats.
• GoDaddy — GoDaddy is not a good choice for Drupal hosting. They do not include stats or shell access. In my experiences, their servers have run Drupal very slowly. They severely limit your FTP connections to the point of being nearly unusable.
• 1and1 — 1and1 is not a good choice for Drupal hosting. Their proprietary server-side stats program is terrible. Like GoDaddy, 1and1 seriously limits your FTP connections and they regularly ban my IP when I do nothing more than try to edit two files at once over FTP.

How to Install Drupal - It's Easy

UPDATE: This tutorial was for Drupal 4.7. With Drupal 5 and Drupal 6 installation is much easier. Just upload the files to your server and visit your site. Follow the directions on the screen and you are done!

I've read some reviews of Drupal online that claim Drupal is hard to install.

I'm not sure what kinds of problems people have had, but installing Drupal is actually very easy if you server is configured correctly.

There are only four steps:

1. Upload Drupal to your server (for Drupal hosting, I recommend Site5)
2. Create a database and database user
3. Edit the file /sites/default/settings.php to add your database connection information
4. Create the database tables using the appropriate .sql file in the /database directory

An easy way to install Drupal

Downloading and Uploading Drupal

First download Drupal from Drupal.org.

Uncompress the file. If you are using Windows and are not sure how to uncompress a file, download a free trial version of WinRAR. WinRAR is similar to WinZIP, but I think it's better.

Upload the files in the Drupal directory to your web server with an FTP program. If you are using GNU/Linux/BSD, Konqueror and gFTP are two good FTP programs. If you are using Windows, try a free FTP program called Filezilla (or Portable Filezilla).

Creating a MySQL database and database user

You should create a database in MySQL for your Drupal installation. You can usually do that through your web hosting control panel. You need to create a database, a database user, and then add the database user to the database with "all" privileges. If you don't know how to create a MySQL database, check your hosting company's help documentation.

Edit settings.php

You then need to add your database connection settings to the file located at /sites/default/settings.php.

Find the line that says:

$db_url = 'mysql://username:password@localhost/databasename';

Fill in your database username, database user's password, the database name, and the database host (usually just localhost)

Create the database tables

Navigate to Drupal's /database directory on the Drupal folder your local computer.

Here is a list of the files in that directory from the current Drupal version 4.7:

You are probably using MySQL. You hosting control panel should let you know which version of MySQL is installed. If you can't find out what version on MySQL is installed, you can create a file called info.php that contains the following lines:

<?php 
  echo phpinfo();
?>

Upload that info.php file to the root of your Web server and then open it in a browser (e.g., http://www.EXAMPLE.com/info.php). That page will display information about your PHP and MySQL installation including the MySQL version.

If you are using MySQL 4.0 then you will use the file called database.4.0.mysql. If you are using MySQL 4.1 then you should use the file called database.4.1.mysql. (If using PostgreSQL, then use the file database.pgsql.)

Go to your web hosting control panel and find PHPmyAdmin (most hosting companies offer it). Click on the tab that says "Import" as shown below:

Use the "Browse" button to find the correct database file to upload. PHPmyAdmin will create your database from that file.

Finished

After you complete those steps Drupal should be installed. Navigate to your new Drupal site (e.g., http://www.EXAMPLE.com/) and you should see the welcome page something like the one shown below, although yours may have a different blue theme:

Follow the directions on that page to create the admin account, and configure your new Drupal site. More information can be found in the Drupal handbooks.

Further tutorials will cover how to set up and customize your new Drupal site.

How to Make a Drupal Theme

Making a custom Drupal theme is actually quite easy. A Drupal theme is just a few PHP files and a CSS file. I prefer the PHPtemplate theme engine (the default one) but you have several choices. See the bottom of this post for a link to the official Drupal Theme Developer's Guide which has information on other Drupal template engines.

The following information was originally written for Drupal 4.7, but the concepts also work for Drupal 5 and 6 too.

Navigate to your /themes directory. You should have a theme there called /bluemarine. We will use that as an example.

NOTE: before you edit any files you will copy the theme to another directory and rename it. Your custom themes go in the directory /sites/all/themes/. Details about that come later in this tutorial.

Here is a list of the files in the Bluemarine Drupal template:

The Files of a Drupal Template

• page.tpl.php — The main template that defines the content on most of the page.
• style.css — The CSS file that sets the CSS rules for the template.
• node.tpl.php — This file defines the content of the nodes.
• block.tpl.php — Defines the content of the blocks.
• comment.tpl.php — Defines the content of the comments.
• logo.png — Your logo, if you are using one.
• screenshot.png — This is a screenshot of your theme that is used in the admin panel and in the user account settings if you have enabled more than one theme so that visitors can choose which theme they want to use.
• box.tpl.php — puts a box around things like comments. See also http://drupal.org/node/11814.

page.tpl.php and style.css

The page.tpl.php and style.css files are the main files for your Drupal theme. The page.tpl.php is a mix of HTML and PHP. Look at the file and notice which snippets of PHP are used where. For example, the following snippet from the page.tpl.php file inserts the site's <head> information. Just copy that snippet into your own custom Drupal template.

<head>
  <title><?php print $head_title ?></title>
  <?php print $head ?>
  <?php print $styles ?>
  <?php print $scripts ?>
  <script type="text/javascript"><?php /* Needed to avoid Flash of Unstyle Content in IE */ ?> </script>
</head>

The following code from the Bluemarine page.tpl.php file use PHP if statements to print out optional information such as primary links, secondary links, and site slogan. You control whether those display in the Drupal control panel. The Bluemarine template uses tables, but you can easily remove the tables and make it a 100% CSS-based template.

<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" id="header">
  <tr>
    <td id="logo">
      <?php if ($logo) { ?><a href="<?php print $base_path ?>" title="<?php print t('Home') ?>">
<img src="<?php print $logo ?>" alt="<?php print t('Home') ?>" /></a><?php } ?>
      <?php if ($site_name) { ?>
<h1 class='site-name'><a href="<?php print $base_path ?>" 
title="<?php print t('Home') ?>"><?php print $site_name ?></a></h1><?php } ?>
      <?php if ($site_slogan) { ?><div class='site-slogan'><?php print $site_slogan ?></div><?php } ?>
    </td>
    <td id="menu">
      <?php if (isset($secondary_links)) { ?>
<div id="secondary"><?php print theme('links', $secondary_links) ?></div><?php } ?>
      <?php if (isset($primary_links)) { ?>
<div id="primary"><?php print theme('links', $primary_links) ?></div><?php } ?>
      <?php print $search_box ?>
    </td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td colspan="2"><div><?php print $header ?></div></td>
  </tr>
</table>

The Drupal styles.css File

The style.css file is straightforward. I recommend the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar for creating the style.css file. Use the toolbars option Display ID & Class Details in the Information menu to view the CSS classes and ID's that Drupal is generating. Then add your own CSS rules to the style.css file.

Other Drupal Theme Files

Other files in the Drupal theme are block.tpl.php, box.tpl.php, comment.tpl.php, and node.tpl.php. Each one controls the layout of certain parts of the template. The comment.tpl.php defines the comment layout as shown below. It is fairly straightforward PHP: "If there is a user picture, print the user picture, etc.

  <div class="comment<?php if ($comment->status == COMMENT_NOT_PUBLISHED) print ' comment-unpublished'; ?>">
    <?php if ($picture) {
    print $picture;
  } ?>
<h3 class="title"><?php print $title; ?></h3>
<?php if ($new != '') { ?><span class="new"><?php print $new; ?></span><?php } ?>
    <div class="submitted"><?php print $submitted; ?></div>
    <div class="content"><?php print $content; ?></div>
    <div class="links">&raquo; <?php print $links; ?></div>
  </div>

Your First Custom Drupal Theme

Just make a copy of the default Bluemarine template and put it in your Drupal /sites/all/themes/ directory. That directory doesn't exist by default, so you should create it if you haven't already. See the README file in /sites/all/ for more information. Rename the copy of Bluemarine to the name of your new theme. Enable the new theme.

Then strip most of the HTML out of the page.tpl.php file and replace it with the HTML that you would like for your theme. Leave the PHP, modifying it as desired. If you are using Linux for Web development, you can use Quanta Plus as an editor to edit your template files directly on the server. Each time you save the file in Quanta Plus, the remote copy of the file will be updated.

Use the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar's Display ID & Class Details feature to view CSS information on your new template that you are viewing the the browser. Either start a new style.css file from scratch, or modify the existing one to get the template the way you would like. To edit the display of blocks, nodes, and comments, edit the block.tpl.php, node.tpl.php, and comment.tpl.php files respectively.

When you are finished with your template, take a screenshot and resize it to about 150x90 pixels. Upload it to your theme directory as screenshot.png.

Drupal Template Variables

The PHP snippets in the examples above are just printing PHPtemplate variables. A complete list of available PHPtemplate variables that you can use in your template can be found on Drupal.org's PHPtemplate variables page. Below are the available variables from 24 July 2007:

$breadcrumb

HTML for displaying the breadcrumbs at the top of the page.

$closure

Needs to be displayed at the bottom of the page, for any dynamic javascript that needs to be called once the page has already been displayed.

$content

The HTML content generated by Drupal to be displayed.

$directory

The directory the theme is located in , e.g.

themes/box_grey or themes/box_grey/box_cleanslate.

$footer_message

The footer message as defined in the admin settings.

$head

HTML as generated by drupal_get_html_head().

$head_title

The text to be displayed in the page title.

$help

Dynamic help text, mostly for admin pages.

$is_front

True if the front page is currently being displayed. Used to toggle the mission.

$language

The language the site is being displayed in.

$layout

This setting allows you to style different types of layout ('none', 'left', 'right' or 'both') differently, depending on how many sidebars are enabled.

$logo

The path to the logo image, as defined in theme configuration.

$messages

HTML for status and error messages, to be displayed at the top of the page.

$mission

The text of the site mission.

$node

(5.x and after only)If you are in page.tpl.php displaying a node in full page view then $node is available to your template.

$onload_attribute

(4.7 and older only) Onload tags to be added to the head tag, to allow for autoexecution of attached scripts.

$primary_links (array)

An array containing the links as they have been defined in the phptemplate specific configuration block.

$scripts

(5.x and after only) HTML to load the JavaScript files and make the JS settings available. Previously, javascript files are hardcoded into the page.tpl.php

$search_box

True(1) if the search box has been enabled.

$search_button_text

(4.7 and older only)Translated text on the search button.

$search_description

(4.7 and older only)Translated description for the search button.

$search_url

(4.7 and older only)URL the search form is submitted to.

$secondary_links (array)

An array containing the links as they have been defined in the phptemplate specific configuration block.

$sidebar_left

The HTML for the left sidebar.

$sidebar_right

The HTML for the right sidebar.

$site

The name of the site, always filled in.

$site_name

The site name of the site, to be used in the header, empty when display has been disabled.

$site_slogan

The slogan of the site, empty when display has been disabled.

$styles

Required for stylesheet switching to work. This prints out the style tags required.

$tabs

HTML for displaying tabs at the top of the page.

$title

Title, different from head_title, as this is just the node title most of the time.

There are also other variables available for your Drupal theme. A good list can be found in Chapter 8 of the essential book Pro Drupal Development. I believe that Chapter 8 is a free sample download.

Also check out these two books from Packt Publishing: Drupal 5 Theming and Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6.

More Drupal Theme Documentation

For more information on how to make a Drupal theme, check out the official Drupal Theme Developer's Guide, the PHPTemplate theme engine documentation, and the Themeable Functions list.

Drupal Editors

After trying many different text editors and IDEs I've settled on Vim. If you don't already use Vim, I highly recommend checking it out. It has a bit of a learning curve, but it's worth it because it makes text editing much easier.

Also, because you will probably doing some Drupal work over SSH, Vim is ideal because it is most likely available when accessing your server over SSH.

If you are new to Vim, you might want to start with Cream—an easy to use version of Vim. Also work through some Vim tutorials. Print out some Vim cheatsheets and paste them next to your desk, or keep them available on your desktop. After getting used to the commands, switch from Cream to Gvim (shown below, running on Ubuntu GNU/Linux).

If you already use Vim, check out the configuring Vim for Drupal page on Drupal.org. It has some great tips.

I normally set my Vim to indent with four spaces. However, Drupal coding standards require only two spaces. One neat trick mentioned on the Vim for Drupal page is that you can place the following modeline at the bottom of any of your source code files and Vim will automatically apply those settings to the file every time you open it:

// vim: set filetype=php expandtab tabstop=2 shiftwidth=2 autoindent number smartindent:

(My version is slightly different than the one on Drupal.org because I've added number which tells Vim to add line numbers to the file when I open it.)

For more information on modelines, type :help modeline into Vim.

If you prefer another editor, Drupal.org also has information on configuring Emacs and Eclipse for Drupal.

If you are looking for a simpler kind of text editor just as a replacement for Windows Notepad, maybe try HTML Kit (Windows-only, though possible to run on Linux with WINE), PSPad (Windows), SciTE (Windows or Linux), or Notepad++ (Windows-only). If you are using Linux, try Quanta Plus. I don't have a Mac so I'm not sure what editors are available for it other than Emacs and Vim.

Drupal Resources

If you haven't already found these resources, check them out:

• Drupal.org — when you get stuck on something in Drupal, ask in the forums on Drupal.org
• Lullabot Drupal Podcast — Excellent podcasts about Drupal. Try this one to start: Deprecated ways of doing things in Drupal.
• Drupal Dojo — Learn how to be a Drupal ninja

Drupal Security - the CHANGELOG.txt file

I've been having a lot of problems lately with WordPress sites getting hacked. So far no one has hacked any of my Drupal sites.

Every Drupal installation comes with a CHANGELOG.txt file in the root directory. It gives hackers a potential way to see what version of Drupal you're running. I recommend changing the name of CHANGELOG.txt to something that can be guessed. Don't delete the file completely because it lets you know what version of Drupal you're running.

I think that CHANGELOG.txt should automatically be renamed by Drupal during installation, but it has already been discussed and the discussion has been closed. So for now the file has to be renamed manually.

Drupal Security Team Updates

It's also wise to make sure you're running the latest release of Drupal. You can sign up for Drupal security announcements. Drupal 5.10 was released today and I got an email from them right away.

If you find any security holes in Drupal, report them to the Drupal security team.

Drupal Taxonomy Tutorial

One of Drupal's best features is taxonomy. This tutorial gives an introduction on how to use Drupal's taxonomy system.

New users to Drupal sometimes find taxonomy difficult to understand at first. I recommend reading all the way through this tutorial once. If the first part doesn't make sense, I hope that it will by the end.

Taxonomy can be thought of as categories or tags. Drupal taxonomy is made up of vocabularies and terms. A vocabulary is a set of terms and terms are just another word for categories.

The image below is from the taxonomy (categories) page located at http://example.com/admin/content/taxonomy:

Let's build the taxonomy for a news site as an example. First click on the Add vocabulary tab. You will then see a screen that looks something like the following image:

For Vocabulary name type in News. For Description enter Categories that fall in the news section of the site. For Help text, enter Please choose a section of the Web site for this news story.

Continuing down the page, you will see something like the following image. It will probably have fewer options than what you see below. The example below is from a site that has many different content types. If you are using a new Drupal installation, you might just see two content type options: Page and Story. For this tutorial, just check the box for Story and leave the rest unchecked. That means that only Story nodes can use categories from the News vocabulary (remember that a vocabulary is a collection of terms or categories).

The next part of the page has additional options:

Check the option Single hierarchy. That means that categories will be able to have a parent-child relationship, with only one parent for each child term. I'll explain that concept below.

Check the option Required. That means that every story node (news page) will have to be placed in one category of the site.

Leave the other options unchecked for now. Here is a quick explanation in case you would like to use them on your site:

Hierarchy: Disabled

This means that categories do not have a parent-child relationship (sub-categories). All categories are on the same level.

Hierarchy: Single

Single Hierarchy means that your categories can have parent-child relationships. Each child can only have one parent category. For example, you might have a category called "Widgets", and then several subcategories called "Green Widgets", "Blue Widgets", and "Red Widgets". The subcategories could only be children of the "Widgets" category, and not subcategories of any other category.

Hierarchy: Multiple

Multiple Hierarchy means that your categories can have parent-child relationships and that each child can have multiple parent categories. For example, if you have two categories called "Cheap Widgets" and "Expensive Widgets", your subcategories, "Green Widgets", "Blue Widgets", and "Red Widgets", might be subcategories of both "Cheap Widgets" and "Expensive Widgets".

Related Terms

You can use this to choose related categories for each term, but I don't know if it has any use in Drupal's default setup unless you are writing custom PHP code.

Free Tagging

Free tagging allows you to enter categories on the node creation pages instead of choosing them from a list. Drupal uses AJAX to suggest possible categories that already exist in the database. This option is useful when you want to give your users freedom to define their own categories—for example adding tags to blog posts.

Multiple Select

This option allows you to select more than one category for a node.

Required

This option makes it so that you can't create a node without choosing a category for it.

Weight

The Weight controls the order that vocabularies (sets of categories) are displayed in.

After you have submitted the form as explained above, you will see something like the following screen:

The vocabulary has been created, but there are no terms categories in it yet. Click on the Add terms link.

For Term name enter Local. For Description enter Local News. Then click the submit button. You will be directed back to the same form where you can add another category. For Term name enter World. For Description enter World News.

After you have created the first two terms, create the third, but this time choose a parent category Local from the drop-down select box as shown below:

Name the term Sports. That will be the category for the local sports section.

Continue to add terms, in a hierarchical structure as shown in the outline below:

• News [this is the name of your vocabulary]
  • Local
    • Business
    • Sports
    • Weather
  • World
    • Entertainment
    • Sports
    • Technology

It will look something like the following image:

Pathauto Module and Taxonomy

For optimal results, I recommend also setting up the Pathauto Module. Using the Pathauto Module with Taxonomy will allow you to automatically generate custom URLs that put each news item in a different section of the Web site.

After you have the Pathauto Module installed, enter the following setting for Story Paths:

The settings [vocab]/[catpath]/00[nid]-[title] will create news URLs that look like http://example.com/news/local/weather/0025-page-title and were chosen for the following reasons:

[vocab]

This will be replaced with the name of your vocabulary— in this case news.

[catpath]

This will be replaced with the category and all of the parent categories. For example, a post in Local—>Weather will have a catpath of local/weather.

00[nid]-[title]

This might be a little bit controversial, but there is a reason for doing it. If you would like to someday be included in Google News you need a unique three-digit number in your news URLs. [nid] is the node ID which is unique for each node. Padding it with two leading zeros guarantees that the number will always be at least three digits. The [title] is the title of your post and it optional for people who want to include keywords in their URL.

Now you have setup Drupal to have a news section that will automatically organize your content by category and generate nice URLs for you.

If you also want blogs on your site you could create a second vocabulary called Tags and choose the freetagging option. Also choose Disable Hierarchy. Make the vocabulary required by checking the relevant checkbox on the Add Vocabulary page. Associate the Tags vocabulary only with the blog post content type. Choose a URL structure in Pathauto—perhaps something like blogs/[user]/[cat]/[title] or blogs/[cat]/[title].

If you have questions, please leave a comment below. See also the Pathauto Tutorial for more information about how to make Taxonomy and Pathauto work together.

Further Reading

For more about Drupal Taxonomy, see the Drupal Taxonomy Handbook.

If you are interested in actually building a news site in Drupal, check out the writeup of the New York Observer project.

Drupal's Twitter Module Test

I've added this site to Twitter at http://twitter.com/webmastertips.

Drupal has a Twitter Module, but it doesn't come with any documentation. This post is a first test of Drupal's Twitter Module on this site. If it works, I'll follow up on this post.

UPDATE: The Twitter Module for Drupal works. Here is some documentation for it:

1. Download the Twitter Module from Drupal.org.
2. Upload it to your /sites/all/modules/ directory.
3. Enable the module in your Drupal admin section.
4. Click on My account in your navigation menu and then on the edit tab.
5. Enter your Twitter username and password, and the text format like this:
   

Once you have followed those five steps, every time you post to your Drupal site from that user account it will add the post to your Twitter account.

An alternate method for auto-posting to Twitter that I prefer is Twitterfeed. The difference between the Drupal Twitter module and Twitterfeed is that the Drupal module allows all your users to post their own content to their own Twitter profile. Twitterfeed is a 3rd party service that has to be manually setup for each feed.

By the way, check out this comparison of icons from Drupal (top) and Twitter (bottom).

How to Backup a Drupal Site

Backing up a Drupal site has always been a tedious process. I've just learned about an easier way.

The Old Way

In the past I've always used this method to backup a Drupal site:

1. Backup the website with SSH
2. Figure out how to login to client's webhosting control panel and either mysqldump over SSH or use PHPmyAdmin.

The Easier Way

(I learned about this method from Ferenc's travel photographer blog. His Photography Directory is built in Drupal.)

Download and install Drupal's Backup and Migrate Module. Then go to admin > content > Backup & Migrate and follow the directions.

Basically, you can just click a button and backup your entire Drupal database with only the data you want to keep. The unnecessary data from the cache and accesslog tables aren't backed up so the file size of the backups is smaller than it would be if doing a mysqldump.

Here's a screenshot:

There are also options to compress the file before download, or add a datestamp:

The Backup & Migrate modules is one of the best Drupal Modules. I can't imagine going back to the old method. It's great because even clients can backup their own websites. This module doesn't backup the files for you, but it's quick to backup the files over SSH, or just download over sFTP.

How to Fix Drupal's 'Create Content' Link Problem

Sometimes the Drupal menu will have a bug where the create content link will appear even for users that aren't logged in. Here is a screenshot of the problem:

Fixing the problem should just involve going to your menu settings page (http://example.com/admin/build/menu) and clicking on the reset link next to the create content link as shown in the image below:

That will reset that menu item and the create content link should then be invisible to anonymous users.

How to Make a Drupal Forum

Drupal's built-in forums are not ideal in all situations, but they make it easy to add a quick forum to your Drupal site.

The default Drupal forums are not very attractive, but they can be improved with a little CSS modification. Here are a couple of examples of great Drupal forums:

• Gallery's Drupal forum
• Mobile Poker's Drupal forum

The Drupal forum tutorial

Go to administer —> modules and enable the forum module.

Go to administer —> forums and you will see a screen like this, although your theme may be different. In these first examples I am using the Sands theme.

The first thing you will do is add containers. Containers are the categories that hold your forums. Containers are optional, but this tutorial shows how to use them. In this example I am going to make three sections of the forum: one section for Linux discussions, one for Windows, and one for Mac. This is the Add Container screen:

After you have made your containers, add your forums. In the following screenshot, I am making a forum section for Damn Small Linux. Notice how I am adding the Damn Small Linux forum to the Linux container with the Parent select box.

After you have added some containers and forums, you will have something that looks like the following screenshot:

How to Style Your Drupal Forums

The look of the forums is controlled by CSS in your style.css file in your current theme directory. You can see your styles with the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar — an essential web design tool. On the Web Developer Toolbar menu, go to Information —> Display ID & Class Details and the CSS IDs and classes will become visible on the web page as shown below:

Here is a closeup, in case the previous image is hard to read:

The container rows have the class .container and the forums rows have the class .forum. You can find those rules in the style.css file and make the changes to those CSS classes.

The Sands theme is a little harder to modify because the CSS is spread across 5 different files, so I'm going to finish the rest of the tutorial using the Bluemarine theme. Here is the relevant CSS from the Bluemarine style.css file with the .container class highlighted:

Just make your modifications there and reload the browser to see the changes. Here is an example of some quick changes to the CSS:

And here are the simple results, showing more contrast between the containers and forums:

A few more CSS modifications:

Here is the result of those final changes. Note how the container names and descriptions are on one line now instead of two lines:

Further Reading

If you want to take your Drupal forum a little further, try installing the Flatforum Module. There are some Drupal forum recipes and discussions here and here, as well as throughout the Drupal.org site (use the search function).

It is possible to import other forum systems into Drupal. Check the Drupal modules page for other forum-related projects such as Drupal vBulletin integration, FUDforum integration, Comment Mover, and more.

The reason that I tend to avoid integrating other forum systems into Drupal is that I want the forums to completely integrate with the rest of the site and to be searchable with the Drupal search form.

Drupal forums don't have as many features as other systems like vBulletin; their main advantage is that they are completely integrated into the rest of the CMS.

Drupal PHP Snippet: How to Check if a Visitor is Logged In

A common question when using Drupal is "How do I show something only to users that are not logged in?" (or vice versa). This is the simple answer for snippets of content:

<?php

// You must include this next line
global $user;

// if visitor is not logged in
if (!$user->uid) {
  // do something if not logged in
} else {
  // do something else if logged in
}

?>

I see many people searching this site for the answer to that. I hope someone finds it useful.

Drupal Pathauto Tutorial

Drupal's Pathauto Module is a great module for SEO. It automatically generates URL aliases for nodes based on highly-configurable rules.

This tutorial starts by introducing Drupal's URL aliases, and then moves on to configuring Pathauto. I'm writing this tutorial for Pathauto version 5.x-2.1, but the basic concepts should apply to other versions also.

First, download the Pathauto module and the Token Module. Both are needed to make Pathauto work. I also recommend installing the related Global Redirect module for reasons mentioned in my Drupal SEO tutorial.

Drupal URL Terminology

Drupal has internal URLs with structures like node/123, user/5, and taxonomy/term/1. If you build a Drupal site and don't use the Path or Pathauto modules, your URLs will look like example.com/node/123.

Drupal's built-in Path module lets you override those default URLs with URL aliases. A URL alias is just an alternate URL that will load an internal Drupal URL.

For example, if you have a node (page) at http://example.com/node/123, you can manually create a URL alias with the Path Module so that http://example.com/green-cars is used instead of http://example.com/node/123. (Side note: the reason for installing the Global Redirect Module above is to prevent duplicate content by creating redirects to the URL aliases.)

The Pathauto Module is a module that automatically generates URL aliases based on your custom Pathauto settings.

Pathauto Settings

After you install Pathauto, go to the Pathauto settings page at admin –> pathauto.

Your Pathauto settings page may look different, depending on which modules you have installed:

Click on General Settings to open that section. In this basic Pathauto tutorial, you can leave everything at the default setting except for this section:

For Update action, be sure to choose "Do nothing. Leave the old alias intact." That will prevent your URLs from accidentally changing if you change the title of an already published node.

I have some sites with characters in foreign languages so I check the box that says "Transliterate prior to creating alias". That means that if you use non-English characters in your post titles, Pathauto will convert them to their equivalents instead of replacing them with a dash.

You won't be able to check the box until you make a i18n-ascii.txt file, which is as easy as renaming the one that comes in the Pathauto directory (just remove the word "sample" from the existing file's filename). There is a page on Drupal.org with information about customizing your transliteration file if you need something else from it.

I also check the box that says "Reduce strings to letters and numbers from ASCII-96" because search engine crawlers are not very smart and I like to keep things simple for them.

The only setting that you need to change in the Punctuation Settings section is the one for Hyphen. Change it to No action (do not replace) as shown below:

The only reason for that is to remove an error message that will otherwise appear.

Pathauto Rules

Each content type in Drupal can have a different set of Pathauto URL rules. The URL rules can be based on things like taxonomy term ("category"), node ID number, title of the node, date or time based, author name, etc.

Here is a sample list of available tokens that you can use in URLs that you can view by clicking on "Replacement patterns" on the Pathauto configuration page:

You then enter the above-mentioned replacement patterns in your Pathauto rules for each content type:

In the screenshot above I'm creating very "non-Drupal" URL paths. More common would be to leave out the [nid] and the .html file extension.

Pathauto Warnings

There is a page on Drupal.org about dangerous Pathauto patterns. You can avoid all of those potential problems by just making sure that you never use just [title-raw] as the only setting for Pathauto. There should always be more data in the URL than just the title otherwise people could authenticate your site in Google Webmaster Tools or create a URL alias that conflicts with an existing system path.

The thing you don't want is for someone to be able to create a node called "This is my post" and have the resulting URL be example.com/this-is-my-post. You should have a little more data in there.

Examples of extra data that you could add to the Pathauto rules are:

• Node: content/[title-raw] which would result in: example.com/content/this-my-post
• Node: even better would be [term-raw]/[title-raw] because then it would put your content in keyword-themed directories.
• Node: [nid]-[title-raw] which would result in: example.com/123-this-my-post. The node ID number is good in certain situations, like when trying to get your site into Google News, which requires a minimum 3-digit number in the URLs.
• Node: you can even create pages with file extensions like this: [term-raw]/[title-raw]-[nid].html which would look like this: example.com/green-cars/this-my-post-123.html
• Taxonomy term: example.com/tags/green-cars

Further Assistance

Drupal's Pathauto Module can be difficult to configure, but it is one of the modules that makes Drupal a great CMS. It's often a good idea to test your Pathauto rules on a sandbox site before putting them on a live site until you figure out patterns that you like.

If you have questions about configuring Pathauto, please leave a comment below.

Drupal SEO

I've decided to organize a section of this Web site around posts related to Drupal SEO. I'll be adding a couple of other tutorials in the next week or two. In the meantime, checkout the previous Drupal search engine optimization articles below.

If you are completely new to search engine optimization, read and bookmark the intro to SEO page, and check out SEO Elite Software.

I also offer Drupal SEO consulting services.

  # To redirect all users to access the site WITHOUT the 'www.' prefix,
  # (http://www.example.com/... will be redirected to http://example.com/...)
  # uncomment and adapt the following:
  # RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
  # RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

  # To redirect all users to access the site WITH the 'www.' prefix,
  # (http://example.com/... will be redirected to http://www.example.com/...)
  # adapt and uncomment the following:
  # RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
  # RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]
  

# Fix PHP session ID problems in Drupal
php_value session.use_trans_sid 0
php_value session.use_only_cookies 1

  RewriteEngine on

  # If your site can be accessed both with and without the prefix www.
  # you can use one of the following settings to force user to use only one option:
  #
  # If you want the site to be accessed WITH the www. only, adapt and uncomment the following:
  # RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
  # RewriteRule .* http://www.example.com/ [L,R=301]
  #
  # If you want the site to be accessed only WITHOUT the www. , adapt and uncomment the following:
  # RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^example\.com$ [NC]
  # RewriteRule .* http://example.com/ [L,R=301]

  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
  RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^example\.com$ [NC]
  RewriteRule (.*) http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

  drupal_set_header('HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found');

  drupal_set_header('Status: 404 Not Found');