learnbythedrop's blog

The first quarterly (hopefully ) Drupal meetup for the Albany, NY group took place last Saturday. Seven people from the upstate New York area attended and there was a lot of really good discussion about Drupal. Here's a summary of some of the things that we discussed.

Drupal for Educators

One member of the group was interested in using Drupal in an education setting. There was a discussion of whether or not Joomla or Drupal would best meet this person's needs. It's not surprising that we all felt Drupal was a great choice. That said I think it's important to be able to clearly and concisely make the value proposition for Drupal vs. other platforms such as Joomla and WordPress. Like anything else if we want Drupal to grow in a competitive environment then we need to know how to sell Drupal.

I recommended joining the Drupal in Education group for active discussion with people who are using Drupal for education on a daily basis. I also recommended checking out Moodle Integration which can add learning management features to a Drupal site. After the meeting I also discovered another Drupal 4 Educators site. There are also plenty of sites to be found via a Google search on "Drupal, Education."

Authentication and Identity

This was a topic that I initiated and lead the discussion on and it was inspired by my recent post about my Adventures in Authentication. This is a topic that everyone is interested in but for different reasons. From an educational point of view it seems that Facebook authentication is most important. There's also the issue of schools only wanting verified students and teachers to be able to sign up. Both security and process are very important. My needs are more general. I want to widen access to site features, build community and also cut down on spam and trolls. 

One very good point was made about consistency of the various APIs made available by the social services. It's hard to have consistent authentication and sharing functionality across services (Twitter, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc.) because of differing API functionality. So while you may need different code in order to connect with each service you will also have different feature sets made available. 

Multi Site Support

I have received a number of queries on this site about how to run multiple domains off of a single Drupal install. This is something you might do if you have yoursite.com and want to also add community.yoursite.com, and allow visitors to have the same account across both sites. The Domain Access module was mentioned as a very good module to use for this purpose. A recent Lullabot blog post shows you how to do it without using a contributed module.

Code Management

Code management is very important for those who are managing very complex sites and maintaining multiple environments. For example, a site administrator might have environments for development, test and production. It's a challenge to keep track of code in those situations. The challenges become even greater when you have multiple sites to manage with multiple environments for each site. Drush was mentioned as a tool to help streamline the module update process. I'm drawing a blank on some of the other tools discussed (Note to self: Take notes next time!) but I found a discussion on Drupal groups called Code Deployment and Build Management that includes a few links to useful contributed modules.

Other Topics

The subject of hosting was discussed and most agreed that shared hosting is for the birds. People differed on their preference for hosting providers. Nothing new there. Virtual Private (or Virtual Dedicated) Servers are coming down in cost (Media Temple, $50/mo. | Dreamhost, $25/mo.) and the performance improvements are worth it. When talking hosting I mentioned Acquia's Drupal Gardens which is now in private beta as an option for those who want to get started quickly with minimum technical knowledge. I also introduced the group to the newly released Fusion themes for Drupal. I am using Fusion/Skinr/Acquia Prosper on Learn By The Drop and the combination has really been awesome in helping me organize and redesign the site.

Final Thoughts

Communicating with the world online is great but these offline (aka face-to-face) interactions are so crucial for networking, community building, and knowledge sharing. So I want to thank Julie Johnson from the Kinderhook Memorial Library for organizing the gathering. It's really worth the time that people put into planning and attending these types of Drupal events so consider organizing or attending one in your local area if you have the time.

I have a lot of ideas about what people want (or need) to learn when it comes to Drupal. My ideas are a function of what I want to do with Drupal and this strongly influences the things that I research, learn, then teach others. My research reveals that there are a lot more things that people want to learn about Drupal. Certainly more than I can offer personally on this site. There are many good Drupal sites and blogs out there but I also know that many people who are working with Drupal and have ideas about the platform are not blogging about Drupal for a variety of reasons. It would be nice to hear from people in that situation because I think they could bring a lot of good knowledge to the table. There are also situations where people are writing about Drupal but their site might not have the reach they would like since they spend most of their time doing other things. Either way, I'd like to be able to help these folks get their knowledge to the wider community.

What I would like to do is create a platform for people who want to write about Drupal so they can reach the wider community and do so without either having to set up their own separate website or spend an inordinate amount of time promoting their own site. At the present time (according to Google Analytics) this site receives about 75,000 page views per month from 23,000 unique visitors. We also have over 900 subscribers to the main FeedBurner Feed and syndication via Drupal Planet. So what gets written here tends to get seen by a decent audience. I'd like to give you the opportunity to get your Drupal ideas, opinions, tutorials, etc. in front of that audience. If you write something good and I decide to publish it here I will pay you for it.

This tutorial shows you how to use the Embedded Media Field module to embed video into posts.

Note: Click the 'full screen' icon (to the left of the volume control) in order to watch online at full 1280x720 resolution.

In my capacity running this site I get a steady stream of inquiries and requests for assistance with everything from initial installs to theme issues to the configuration of modules and more. I have to admit that while I do the best I can to offer advice on these issues many of them are outside the scope of my knowledge. In fact, sometimes when I get inquiries I'm struck by two thoughts that underscore the nature of Drupal. The first thought is that I have a lot to learn. The second thought is that Drupal is one complex system. These thoughts lead me to some blanket advice that I believe can help a lot of people who are just getting into Drupal and scratching their heads about how to tackle what may seem like a monster task.

As I said I have a lot to learn about Drupal. This is after almost four years of building sites with the platform. So the first pieces of advice that with help the hike up Mount Drupal easier are to expect to keep on hiking and focus on the ground in front of you. To put it in clearer language, Drupal requires continuous learning and it's best to focus on learning what you need to know now instead of being in awe of all that you've yet to learn. This situation is not unique to Drupal. The necessity for constant learning is required with any system that is being constantly improved. This is worth pointing out because every day more people are getting introduced to Drupal who came from a world of closed source systems or html-based, non-dynamic websites. What was once relatively static is now a moving target...forever!

A Commitment To Learning

So a commitment to open source web systems is a commitment to learning. I think that Drupal is a complex system. It's also a powerful system and because of that you can do great things with it. I think what draws people to Drupal tends to be the shortcomings of other systems (I once heard someone say that WordPress was like a gateway drug for future Drupal developers) as well as the well known possibilities of Drupal. Those possibilities come with an overhead though. That's why some other advice I would give to people who are new to Drupal is to spend three hours learning for every hour that you try to do something with Drupal. There's no science in that ratio but I've come to believe that initially that this works better than if you flip it around and spend three hours of doing for every hour of learning. 

As far as I'm concerned toying around on a development site is akin to learning. I'm surprised at how many emails I get that start out with something like, "I'm new to Drupal and working on a site for a client..." For the clients sake I say this. Build that learning time into the development estimate. Because it's better to take longer and get it right than to rush it and force inferior process or functionality on the client. Drupal is just not a start today, launch next week (or even next month) system if you're not very familiar with it. The extra time for learning is worth it. It's worth waiting a few months to launch a site that you can be confident does what you want it to do while at the same time you're confident that you can manage it. What's the down side of this approach? The only possible downside is that you spend all this time and Drupal ends up going away or falling apart somehow. That's not happening. So what you're doing is making a valuable investment in the future of how systems are developed on the web.

Focus On The Task At Hand

Then there's the second part about putting your head down and focusing on the ground in front of you. The world of Drupal code is vast. Just look at all the modules on Drupal.org. There are more every day. And older ones are being improved upon to add new functionality. What that means is that if you are new to Drupal and you are keen on packing your first site launch with every feature found in Facebook or MySpace then you're going to run into trouble. Start a list of things that you would like people to be able to accomplish on your site. Prioritize that list and then focus on the top three things. Research the possibilities for making those three things work very well. If you can't make one of those things work well then skip it and pick up number four on the list. Keep in mind that you're implementing these things in addition to getting used to the core Drupal functions like administering the site. You are much better off launching a site with three things that work rock solid than ten things that work half way. You'll be swamped. You'll feel overwhelmed. And you might blame Drupal. Blaming Drupal for being overwhelmed is like blaming a mountain for how high it is. Drupal mountain is big. Take it one step at a time and you'll enjoy the hike.

Get To Know The Admin Functions

I have some other advice to offer. When you first get started with Drupal take a stroll through the admin section. Click on every link you can find in the core admin section. Study each page so that you can see what's available. Perhaps make notes about things you don't understand about the interface or the available options. There's a lot going on in the back end. All of it is important to the site that you will create and maintain for many years perhaps. I know that there is an urge to start doing something more right away. I've been there so I can't point fingers. But when you're done doing whatever it is come back and make a point of clicking all of those links. I've gotten so many notes from people who had probably slapped their foreheads after I pointed some simple out. My responses are usually delayed so I always hope that they were able to find out via Drupal.org or some other Drupal forum. That investment of time in the admin area can hopefully prevent some undue frustration.

My hope is that the advice in this post can help to make the transition to Drupal easier for some people. There's another more universal benefit of all this effort as well. In many ways the situation with Drupal mirrors other parts of our lives. Drupal is constantly changing. So are our lives. New functionality is constantly appearing just as new opportunities and tools are popping up in our lives. Change and complexity is all around us. So learning to slow down, be patient and embrace learning, especially in the early phases of introduction, is a very good thing. The benefits of such an approach extend to other areas. At least I think so. Oh, and one more thing. Have fun with it. Drupal should be fun. If it isn't then perhaps it's time to slow down and focus on the fundamentals.

I'll conclude by letting you know that I consider myself to be about as average as any person who builds Drupal sites can be. I've done some programming in my time but never PHP. I used to work with Dreamweaver, like so many have, but even then I wasn't a web developer by trade. These are the philosophies that have helped me, as a non-developer, get to the point where I can make some things happen with the Drupal platform. There's lots of other sage advice to be had especially at in-person Drupal meetups and on Drupal.org. This is just one more drop into the sea of Drupal advice because the goal of this site is to help you learn one drop at a time.

Comments are the lifeblood of most websites that aim to be social. Drupal based sites are no exception. In fact the feedback I'm seeing is that many people who are new to Drupal get involved with it because building a robust social network using Drupal is easier than something like WordPress which is heavily focused on blogging. That doesn't mean that you won't have to put some thought into how to set up your commenting if you're building a Drupal site.

I like Drupal's built in comment system. It has nice features like threaded comments,  a comment approval section, search indexing of comments and the ability to turn comments on and off for each individual node. Out of the box the comments are very usable for low traffic websites. But if you expect a lot of activity on your site then your comment needs will require putting more thought into how you set things up. Your first big choice will be to decide whether you should build on the existing comment system using contributed modules or if you should use a 3rd party commenting system like Disqus, JS-Kit Echo or IntenseDebate.

If Drupal's built in comments are so good then why even think about shutting them off? As good as the comments are they don't necessarily meet all the needs you might have. For example, if you expect a lot of commenting but don't want to have to do a lot of maintenance and configuration on your Drupal site then a 3rd party system might be good for you. Let's say you want site visitors to be able to authenticate themselves using Google Friend Connect, Facebook or Twitter which are the most popular social networking services in the U.S. right now. You could utilize at least two contributed modules to make your site do that. But you would also spend quite a bit more time doing that than you would just configuring the Disqus module which gives you all of those features which are available via the free (for now) Disqus service. You can see a sample of how Disqus integrates on the module developer's site here. Another attractive feature typically included in these systems involves notifications. Moderators and comments can either subscribe to comments via an RSS feed or by email. Notification features can help to create a community on your site and keep people coming back for repeat visits.

The mileage you get out of 3rd party commenting systems will vary. When you opt for an outsourced approach for such a large portion of your site you also lose some control. Most services will keep a backup of your comments in case you decide to switch back to your native comment system. That doesn't mean that re-importing the comments back into Drupal will be easy. Your site may also be affected by the performance of the servers of the 3rd party service. If their servers have a problem then your site will likely load slowly or comments might not show up at all. So be aware of the trade offs.

If you want people to create accounts on your site in order to comment then you'll want to stick with the core comment system. The 3rd party offerings may authenticate users but they don't create a user profile on your site. If that's the way you're going then there are some contributed modules that you'll want to know about that can enhance the core Drupal commenting experience.

Identity

These modules help to establish the identity of commenters on your site.

• Gravatar - Displays pictures for anonymous commenters who also use the Gravatar service.
• Google Friend Connect - Creates user accounts using Google Friend Connect API.
• Facebook Connect - Creates user accounts using the Facebook Connect API. Also allows commenters to publish comments back to their Facebook wall.
• Gigya Socialize - Offers a single API for creating accounts using identities from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google and others.

Spam

These modules help to limit the effects of spam on your site.

• Mollom - Offers spam filtering via text analysis and captcha presentation.
• AntiSpam - Offers access to the Akismet, Defensio and TypePad spam filtering services.
• Captcha - Allows you to present a CAPTCHA (which is a challenge image) to commenters.
• Comment Lockdown - Applies a set of rules that make it harder for comment spam to get through.

Notification and Moderation

These modules provide notifications of new comments and assist with moderation.

• Comment Notify - Allows registered and anonymous users to get comment notifications via email.
• Watcher - Similar to Comment Notify.
• Comment Moderation - Adds features that improve the comment moderation workflow.

So you've been presented with a lot of options here. The modules listed above certainly don't represent a complete list. You're welcome to link to your favorite ones in the comments. The approach you take will depend on the goals you have for your site, the number of comments you receive and your level of technical knowledge with respect to Drupal and the 3rd party services (such as Disqus) and APIs (such as Facebook Connect) that I've mentioned.