Drupal Pittsburgh June: Best modules for new Drupal users
We had the fourth Drupal Pittsburgh meeting on Tuesday at the Brillobox.
In contrast to most of our meetings, new users outweighed the old hands at this one, so it turned into a session introducing everyone to those essential modules that make Drupal work in the way that every noob thinks it should (and we were all noobs once upon a time).
Making the list:
1. Admin Menu
This module makes Drupal administration so much easier by moving all the admin tasks to a nice dropdown menu at the top of the page. You can also set it to stay visible when you scroll so that your admin tasks are in sight no matter how far down you are on the page. Must have (and have enabled) before you start working.
2. Menu Block
Most people come to Drupal with a site they want to build, and chances are that site is in a nice, neat information architecture with the home page as the parent at the top and all the other pages in a tree below the home. And then they get to Drupal and there is this big pile of nodes that can show up anywhere accross the site, with all sorts of conditionals that specify where and when and how it shows up.
And while that is all really exciting, the first thing all of us wanted as a noob was to have a simple tree structure of pages with section specific subnavs. And you can do that! ...all with the help of the menu system and Menu Blocks.
First place all your pages under the Primary Links menu. You can do this when creating pages in Menu Settings, right below the Title box, or you can go to the menu administration at Site Building -> Menus -> List Menus.
Once you have your menu, you can make it show up on your page by creating a Menu Block at Site Building -> Blocks -> Add Menu Block. Try playing around with some different options for your starting level and your max depth. For instance, start your menu on level two and see how it only shows up on second level pages, and only shows the links for that section. And if you leave the title blank, it will pull the top most page in the section's menu link for the title.
And, of course, remember to place your block in a region where you can see it.
3. Menu Breadcrumbs
Now that you have a menu based hierarchy, you'll want to show that in your breadcrumb trail. Use this module to give a nice trail all the way back to Home. You can also choose not to display home in the breadcrumb trail or to display home but only when there is another breadcrumb in the trail.
4. Pathauto
Now your page has menus with on-states (or at least on-state classes that you can use in your CSS) and a breadcrumb that makes everything look like its in a nice, neat directory tree... so what about the URLs? You can use Pathauto to create urls that have the same structure as your menu path.
Go to Site building -> URL aliases -> Automated alias settings and change your Node path settings default to [menupath-raw].
5. Wysiwyg
One of the biggest complaints about Drupal out of the box is that there is no WYSIWYG functionality. Wysiwyg gives you a way to choose whichever editor you want and get going. Be sure to read the documentation, it tells you how to get all of the different editors. Popular editors are FCKeditor and TinyMCE.
To get inline image capability in your wysiwyg editor, you need to use yet another module. Many people use IMCE. However, its hard to set up and it looks like the maintainer of Wysiwyg recently took over another module, Inline, that has the same funtionality. So this may be the future of inline image handling.
So that should get you started. Good luck!
