5 Things To Teach Yourself In Drupal
We build websites in Drupal every day at the Bivings Group. And every day, we answer questions for clients that are simple, easy things for us to change. Sites built in Drupal are inherently very easy to change and are often malleable to a degree. The problem is that many people see the full-blown Content Management System as an unknowable hurdle-they think that if the larger problems, handled by developers and programmers, can’t be managed by a non-computer scientist than many other things in the site must also be nigh-impossible. This is simply not true.
Here are five public-facing edits that can be made easily by anyone with the most basic of computer skills. These tips will not only help you manage your site, but will allow you a better perception of websites and online programs as manageable constructs that aren’t built and maintained by aliens or magic-wielding online warlocks.
1. Changing the Navigation of Your Website
5 Frustrating Things about Drupal 7
Drupal 7 was officially released in January of this year, so our team at The Bivings Group has had a few months now to familiarize ourselves with the platform. Working with our resident Drupal experts Chris Roane, Mike Lockard and Ronald Isla, last week I wrote a post outlining the things we love about the new platform. This week we’re going to tackle the bad. Following are 5 frustrating things about Drupal 7.
(1) The lack of working modules.
Drupal 6 has been around for a few years, and as a result tons and tons of great community-contributed modules have been built for the platform. These modules represent hundreds of thousands of man hours put in by thousands of programmers. Since Drupal 7 is so new, many of the modules we came to rely on in Drupal 6 haven’t been ported over yet, and many of the ones that have been are still in alpha or beta releases. As an example, the critical Views module is still in beta and the Splash module hasn’t even been started on yet. This can add time to the development process, as we either have to identify new modules to use or develop them ourselves. Time will fix this problem, but in the short term it is a pain.
(2) Similarly, there aren’t as many themes to work with.
According to the Drupal theme database, there are 588 themes for Drupal 6 and 158 for Drupal 7. This doesn’t impact us that much, as we typically develop our own custom themes, using stripped down templates such as Framework as a starting point. But for folks who don’t want to mess with custom theming this lack of choice is a problem. As with the lack of modules, this will be sorted out with time.
(3) The programming learning curve for Drupal 7 is steeper than Drupal 6.
As mentioned in our previous post, for content managers Drupal 7 out of the box is much more usable than Drupal 6. But for programmers working with the system the learning curve is higher. According to our developers, to work with the code on a programming level you have to understand much more of the core system than you did when working with Drupal 6. Specifically, our developers mentioned that mastering the Field API was difficult and that figuring out which hooks to use took some time.
Once you know what you are doing Drupal 7 is much more powerful than 6, but it takes a bit to get your sea legs under you.
(4) Documentation could be a lot better.
Related to number 2, Drupal doesn’t do a great job of providing easy-to-follow documentation. Some simple tutorials or walkthroughs would make things a lot easier.
(5) The update process from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 is no fun.
Drupal 7 is a major change from Drupal 6. As a result, upgrading from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 is not an easy task. The lack of working modules in Drupal 7 makes it even harder. As a result, we’re going to hold off on upgrading most of our sites for a few months until more of the modules we rely on get upgraded. The good news here is that the community should continue supporting Drupal 6 for 3-4 years.
And if you are unlucky enough to need to go from Drupal 5 to 7, the process is even more cumbersome. You can’t go from Drupal 5 to 7 directly, and instead have to go from Drupal 5 to 6, and then from 6 to 7. No fun. For complicated sites, it is probably easier to start fresh than to try to upgrade from Drupal 5 to 7.
11 Things We Love About Drupal 7
Since its release in January of this year, we have used Drupal 7 for all of our new Drupal-based development projects. As a firm, we had thousands and thousands of hours of experience in Drupal 6. There are significant differences between Drupal 6 and 7, so working with the new platform has been a bit of an adjustment for us. Now that we’ve got our sea legs under us, we wanted to share the good and the bad of our experience with the platform so far.
I asked The Bivings Group’s resident Drupal gurus Chris Roane and Mike Lockard for their thoughts, and what follows is a collective list of what we love about Drupal 7. A list breaking down our frustrations will follow in a few days.
(1) The default administrative theme is greatly improved.
In earlier versions of Drupal, the default administrative theme was a bit homely and hard for new, non-technical users to navigate. There were a series of contributed modules for Drupal 6 you could install to improve the situation, but it was an extra step you had to take, and additional moving parts you have to deal with when updating. Drupal now has a slick and user friendly administrative theme as part of core. The administrative interface now includes Ajax goodness, an overall admin toolbar, shortcuts and generally increased loading times.
(2) Improved support for WYSWYG’s.
In Drupal 6 you could enable WYSWYG functionality by installing external modules, but they never seemed to work quite right. Drupal 7 makes the integration of WYSWYG editors more seamless. The end result is that they work better.
(3) Drupal 7 loads faster.
A long time complaint about Drupal is that it makes a lot of database calls, causing high server load that lead to speed issues when serving un-cached pages. Drupal 6 was a big improvement, but Drupal 7 features significantly less SQL queries causing sites to load faster.
(4) CCK is now part of core Drupal.
When working with Drupal 6, installing the Content Construction Kit (CCK) module was pretty much a requirement. CCK has been moved into core and rebranded as the Field API. Moving CCK into core gives developers the power to add fields to not only content types, but also to People, Taxonomy, etc.
(5) The image/file upload feature that is included in the Field API is invaluable.
Uploading files along with content in Drupal 6 was always a bit of a clunky process. Getting it to function the way you wanted was always a battle. In Drupal 7 what you can do right out of the box is much improved:
- The Field API allows you to specify which file types you want to allow (JPG, GIF, PDF, DOC, etc.). It also lets you set upload limits and maximum dimensions when uploading images.
- Files are now uploaded via an AJAX interface. After the file is uploaded it is immediately displayed in the form, where the user sees the file name and can delete the file right there. Further, as the file is uploaded the user sees a loading image so they can be confident that the file is getting loaded.
The end result is more flexibility for developers, and a better experience for administrators. All of this was possible in Drupal 6, but it was a battle to get to the functionality you wanted. The fact that these features are now integrated into the Field API will save developers a lot of headaches.
(6) There is more flexibility in what kind of content can be a custom content type.
In Drupal 6, content types were really designed to be text fields, with the Body field required for all custom content types you created. In Drupal 7, this requirement has been removed. This makes it less clunky to create non-text based custom content types for assets such as PDFs or images.
(7) Working with jQuery plugins is much easier in Drupal 7.
jQuery is probably the most popular JavaScript library, and allows for the rapid development of client side site features. Drupal 7 has made it much easier in general to use jQuery in your themes, and also ships with a jQuery 1.4.4, which is much faster and more feature rich than jQuery 1.2.6, which was the default in Drupal 6. For the front-end developers out there, this is a big improvement that will save lots of time.
(8) Drupal 7 uses PHP Data Objects (PDOs), which allows for developers to more easily write portable code.
By making this switch, Drupal 7 is no longer dependent on any specific type of database. The result is greater flexibility.
(9) There are a lot more hooks, which allow for more customizations on a deeper level.
Hooks are what allow for the modules you write for Drupal to connect to Drupal core. In Drupal 7, there are a lot more hooks and they have separated hooks that were used for multiple tasks into smaller pieces. This makes Drupal 7 truly modular, and gives developers the ability to create deeper customizations.
(10) Drupal 7 is much easier to update.
Keeping Drupal 6 current was a hassle, as to update a module you had to download it, unpack it, upload it again and then run the update. Drupal 7 features an Update manager that tells you when a module is out of date and allows you to update it right from the web interface. Much, much easier, and more like the experience in WordPress.
(11) Blocks are much easier to configure.
In Drupal 6, to create a block you have to first create a block on the page you want it to appear, and then go to the slow-loading block overview page to set where on the page you want it to appear. In Drupal 7 this is all done in one step. While it sounds trivial, this can save a lot of time on more complicated sites.
Update: You can read our post listing some negatives about Drupal 7 here.
The Bivings Group Launches a New Website for the Entomological Society of America
Last night we launched a new Drupal-powered website for the Entomological Society of America. This was a big project, as we had to import over 6,000 pages of flat, HTML content into Drupal and integrate with a variety of third-party platforms. An awesome job by The Bivings Group team. You can check out the site at www.entsoc.org. 
New Website Launched: MyMoneyManagement.net
We are proud to announce that the Bivings Group has launched the completely redesigned financial education website, MyMoneyManagement.net. In terms of the technology behind the website, My Money Management is a Drupal based website that was designed, built and customized entirely in-house. We are also very excited to be consulting with MyMoneyManagement on their social media outreach.
Please take a moment to check out the site, and follow our progress building a social media presence on Facebook and Twitter.
The full press release from our friends at the Financial Services Roundtable is bellow and available on their very stylish new website.
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