Basic concepts

Adding vocabulary terms

admin — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 15:18:03 +0000

Adding vocabulary term is easy.

Go to Administration>Content Management>Categories>List

Go down the vocabulary list and click the 'add terms' link.

Parents

This is only visible if your vocabulary has a single or multiple hierarchy.

You can select one or more parents for your term. If you want the term to be on the same level as all the other terms choose 'root'.

Term name

Give the term a title

Description

If you want to, give the term a description.

Synonym

This can be left blank

Notes

Always make sensible names for your terms as the term names and the parent child relatioships often show in other places around your site such as crumbtrails.

Administering the menu list

admin — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 15:50:14 +0000

Administering the menu lists is easy once you get the hang of it.

Go to Administer>Site Building>Menus>List

This shows the list of menus on the site. They are arranged in blocks, for example the block called Navigation. Under navigation there is a list of all the menu items available.

Some menu items will be active, some will be 'inactive'.

Some will have parents, others wont.

Sorting the menu

This is done by clicking on the 'edit' link on each menu item and changing the Weight.

Applying a light weight makes the menu item float to the top of the list. Applying a heavier weight makes the menu item sink to the bottom.

In Drupal 6, this will be replaced by a drag-drop mechanism.

Each menu item has 3 options

Administration theme

admin — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 20:54:08 +0000

Always choose an administation theme.

You do this by going to:

Administer>Site Configuration>Administrative Theme

Choose a standard out-of-the-box theme such as Bluemarine or Garland.

Why? Well if you are experimenting with doing your own theme and something goes wrong, the site can go blnk and there's no way to get back into it!

Using a reliable Admin theme gets rid of this problem.

Creating a vocabulary

admin — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 13:37:42 +0000

Make sure you are logged in as an administrator.

Go to Administer>Content Management>Categories>Add vocabulary.

Title

Give you vocabulary a title.

Description

Give your vocabulary a description.

Help text

Give your vocabulary some help text when adding terms to it.

Types

Check any content types you wish to use with this vocabulary. This can be a useful way of restricting what users can do with the site.

Hierarchy

Disabled

When you add terms there are no parent-child relationships.

Example:

Red
Green
Blue
Orange
Yellow

Single

When you add terms there is a single level of parent-child relationship.

Example

Difference between menus and categories

admin — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 11:22:57 +0000

It is easy to get confused about menus and categories.

Menus are simply links to other bits of your website or other resources on the Internet.

Categories are places on your website where you organise content.

If you create a category, then you can put content into it.

But you wont be able to see the list of content inside the category unless you create a menu item that links to it.

Linking a menu item to a category

admin — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 16:56:07 +0000

Linking to a category

Suppose you have categorised a load of stories and you want to link to them and display them as a listing?

All you do is go to Administer>Content Management>Categories>List

This
lists the Vocabularies. Click the 'list terms' link on the vocabulary
you are using. This shows all the terms in the vocabulary. Hover your
mouse over the term you wish to use and the link shos up in the Status
Bar of your browser. (The Status Bar is usually right at the bottom of
your browser window.)

The link follows the pattern http://ww.mysite.com/taxonomy/term/3

Paste in the taxonomy/term/3 part of the path and this will ceate your listing.

Linking to more than one category

Imagine you have two different categories and you want a single menu item that will list them both.

All you need to do is go to the list of term and pick up the taxonomy term IDs.

Menus

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 11:46:49 +0000

A menu is simply a list of items used to navigate a website.

A menu item is an individual link within the menu.

A menu item consists of the Title - the words you click on - and the URL - the place you wish to go to when you click on the Title.

You can link a menu to anything within your Drupal site such as

a node
a page
a view
a taxonomy item

or you can link it to any other resource on the Internet such as another website.

In Drupal you can:

create any number of menu items
nest menu items inside one another
order the menu items list
create menu Blocks that you can assign to different regions within the page

Modules

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 11:38:24 +0000

Modules add functionality to your site. For example, if you wanted to add blogs to your site, you would install and configure the Blog module.

The most popular modules come pre-installed with SynergyShare.

There are dozens more that can be added and the list is constantly being updated. SynergyShare makes sure that your modules are always the up-to-date ones and can add more upon request.

You can view the full list here.

You can find out how to instal and configure modules here.

Starting your own theme

admin — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 21:10:13 +0000

Starting a theme from scratch can be quite daunting.

One of the biggest problems is browser compatibility. What might work in Firefox does not work well in IE6 or 7 for example even for just a basic layout.

The easist way is to use one of Drupal's basic themes such as Bluemarine or Garland or the excellent Zen theme. All the browser compatibility work has been done for the basic layouts. All you have to do is to experiment with the CSS files.

All you do is dowmload it from the Drupal theme site or here http://themegarden.org/drupal50/

Rename the theme's folder and then upload it by FTP to the theme folder in your Drupal installation.

You can then begin to play with the CSS files to amend them theme to what you require.

CSS is beyond the scope of this article.