Drupal Tutorials

One of the most off-putting things about Drupal 7 for new users is the fact that it ships without a WYSIWYG editor. We've been used to using WYSIWYG editors for a number of years, so Drupal forcing us to edit in plain text or HTML is confusing.

This tutorial shows you how to install the Git version control system on a Mac. It assumes a little familiarity with the Command Line. If you don't know how to use the Command Line, then check out Addison Berry's excellent series of video tutorials over at lullabot.com: you can find the first one here and the rest here.

Migrating a Drupal site from one development platform to another can be a real pain. Nicole Bluto wrote a great blog post for the 2009 LA Drupalcamp on how to migrate a Drupal 6 site cleanly:

http://www.drupalcampla.nicolebluto.com/node/3

Here's a distilled, step-through version of that post, tested between two OS X accounts, both running XAMPP:

The export

1. Download and install http://drupal.org/project/backup_migrate
2. Navigate to admin/content/backup_migrate

One of the most frustrating things that can happen when you're building a Drupal site is for the site to go blank - entirely blank, so whenever you load the site you're presented with the infamous White Screen of Death.

There are loads of tips on that page that will help you recover from a WSOD, but the three most common causes are:

• Issues with PHP memory limits (there's some stuff about that here).

Most people who don't need to code never have to learn how to code, and live their lives in bissful ignorance. This includes people like graphic designers who use a computer every day to do pretty technical things: Photoshop, for example. But when they come to do Drupal theming, these same people need to know a load of coding fundamentals that aren't covered in even the most basic PHP tutorials.

This is very straightforward, but I always forget how to do it. I'm writing this post in part so that I have something to refer back to :-).

So, in order to filter a view so that it only shows content that has been created by the currently logged-in user:

1. Create the view!
2. Add an argument for User: Uid
3. Under "Action to take if argument is not present", select "Provide default argument" and then "User ID from logged in user".
4. Hit Update, then save your view. You're done!

Earlier this year I built my first non-trivial Drupal site. It's pretty simple on the surface, but allows certain users to create nodes which represent a piece of work they've done for the organisation. using Views and Views Calc and a bit of custom code, these nodes are used to produce invoices for each of these users every month.

Earlier this year I needed to make a bit of money so I developed a database app in Filemaker. In many ways I found it a real pain to use - selecting each line of the code you want to write from a clickable list is far from ideal - but its limitations meant that debugging was really straightforward: use the built-in step-through debugger, follow everything through, find the bug, fix it.

Using the Flag module it is possible to add flags to your node edit forms. For example, you might want to give your users the option of flagging a node for review by a senior editor, or flagging a node as complete but in need of subediting.

First thing this morning I started trying to get to grips with Drupal's node access API. The node access API allows you to fine-tune which of your users should see which nodes. My current big project has node types in which users are referenced; I wanted to be able to allow those users to see only those nodes in which they are referenced, and then only those nodes which the creating user has not flagged as being private.