drupal

drupal

Drupal: Open source content management

This site is running on Drupal, a powerful and flexible open source content management system which runs on PHP and MySQL. Drupal has a slightly steeper learning curve for development and doesn't have as much eye-candy in the back end as does Joomla!, but it more than makes up for that with its robust system of tagging (which is referred to as "taxonomy"). Where Joomla! requires categorization of content with one section and one category within that section, Drupal allows multi-tagging, hierarchical tags, and even free tagging where you can type tags on the fly. See my portfolio on this site for an example of multi-tagging: items are tagged with client name, client type, and project type, so each page can show up in multiple locations on the site, depending what the user is searching for.

Making your Drupal page Facebook "Share a link" friendly

How to tell Facebook which image and what description to use for the preview when people post your page as a link on their profile

I was about to post a link to my latest portfolio entry on my Facebook wall and I realized it didn't pull in the correct image. I did a quick bit of research and found a solution that took only a few minutes to implement and allows you to spoon-feed Facebook a title, description and image for your page.

The "Basic Tags" section on this page gives you the three lines of code you need:

In my case, I already had a Drupal CCK field containing the image path I wanted to use, as well as a page title and a short description, so all I had to do was add the lines above in the <head> seciton of the page and replace the content with the PHP variables containing the appropriate field information.

Facebook will try to guess which images to include if you don't do this, so you may find it unnecessary if it's guessing correctly. On my site, the images Facebook guessed on a number of pages were the RSS, Twitter, and Facebook icons -- completely unrelated to the content. If you're having similar issues or if you're just a control freak, the code above should help you out.

How to theme Views RSS output (and include CCK fields) in Drupal 6

I continue to tweak and refine this site as I have time, and one of the things I recently fixed was the RSS display. (This will be technical mumbo-jumbo to some, but it may be helpful to folks who are using Drupal and want to do the same). I wanted to include a CCK field in the RSS feed display and theme it -- by default it was just using the Drupal setting (/admin/content/rss-publishing) which was in my case to display the title and teaser. Then it was tacking onto the bottom whichever CCK fields were visible in the teaser, but it was very unsightly.

I experimented with different .tpl.php files in my theme directory but was having trouble getting the Views RSS feed to pick up the changes. The solution I ended up using was simply to install the contemplate module, which made it extremely simple. All you have to do is go to the Content Templates page in your admin panel (/admin/content/templates), choose the content type that you wish to modify, and click "Create template."

This opens up a window giving you control over the display of the teaser, body, and RSS for the content type. I had already themed the teaser and the body using .tpl.php files, so I just modified the RSS setting on this page. The beauty of it is that it provides a clickable list of variables from your content type that can be inserted directly into the HTML code you are building for the output.

I'm beginning to think I should handle most of my custom theming for teaser and body this way, too. It makes it extremely easy to update and much simpler to paste the variables in. (Previously I spent a lot of development time using print_r ($node) to try to figure out how to refer to the variables in the .tpl.php files.

Hope it's helpful to someone.

Cliniclegal.org

A site redesign and development in an open source CMS to make updating easier among the team of updaters, to make content more accessible to the public and to members, and to provide a more attractive face to the public.

Coc.org

Site refresh, both visually (with an updated look and feel) and under the hood (with a more powerful content manager).

EducationForJustice.org

An expansive membership-based website chock full of prepared resources related to Catholic Social Teaching for educators with custom code snippets and a complex tagging system.

laryn.kragtbakker

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