My Drupal Journal
Note (11/18/06): as expected, it's really hard to maintain documentation on a regular basis. This is particularly true in my Drupal learning process which is tied to the larger conversations/documentations in that community (the Drupal forums and handbooks). My 'journaling' is even more spread out as I learn more contributed modules, especially CiviCRM in my case, which entails participation in other listservs and forums. I also test Drupal and its contrib modules for some organizations so some 'documentations' go in those particular conversations too.
So, what I'm going to do is to bring in my 'collection' of conversations from the Drupal forums into this journal by linking to my page of Drupal posts. This will serve as my Drupal journal for now. I will be rearranging these posts and posts from other places into more organized documentations later.
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October 21, 2006
I thought a chronicle of how this site is being created using Drupal would be an appropriate content to explore the book module in Drupal. The pages that will go in this book will try to follow the workflow below:
- Define a task.
- Identify features and functionalities in Drupal that would accomplish the task.
- Link to existing documentation related to such features and functionalities.
- Execute task and add value to existing documentation by detailing the process.
- Evaluate the features and functionalities against the task.
- Identify areas for further study and exploration.
Customizing a theme
Downloading and installing a theme
I have chosen Multiflex by G. Wolfgang as the theme that I can customize for my Drupal site. I like its use of colors to highlight groups of content. I think that the combination of blues accented by yellows, purples, and greens gives a standard yet lively environment for interacting with information on the site. This theme didn't come with the core installation of Drupal so I had to download and install it. Here's how I did it:
- Went to Drupal's Themes page. Scrolled down to Multiflex and clicked Download.
- Unzipped the file multiflex-4.7.0.tar to the themes folder of my Drupal directory on my computer.
- Uploaded the multiflex folder to the themes folder of the Drupal installation on my hosted shared web server.
- Logged in to my Drupal site and went to administer>themes. The new theme has been added to the list of themes I can enable.
- Clicked the Enable as well as the Default buttons.
...to be continued. I'm learning how to detail my process. What level of detail is really helpful for my intended audience? I probably just need to say "download & install your chosen theme" and they know exactly the details of how to do that. We'll see.
Subscribing to syndicated content
Relevant page in the Drupal Handbooks:
Aggregator: syndicating content
Introduction
RSS feeds and other formats of content syndication have been talked about a lot in the library world especially how it is part of a Web 2.0 information environment. You can easily find articles on what is RSS and such but I have yet to find some instructions on how I can use it for certain library functions. Perhaps people who write about Web 2.0 tools assume anyone can put two and two together and go forth and apply such new tools. But I haven't really understood these technologies until I started using them to build useful resources such as an alert service. The following sections will cover tasks related to subscribing content from external sources using Drupal's aggregator module.
Building an alert service
Currently, most libraries are alerted of new titles and content by publishers and vendors via email. But increasingly, these alert services are also offered via RSS feeds which libraries can then pull to their websites to alert their patrons. Subscribing to these feeds is pretty much straightforward and anyone with a feed reader can do so. Sometimes, however, it might be helpful to some folks to have someone detail how that is done. And so I will show here how I have used feeds and Drupal's aggregator to build a collection of links that will alert users of this site to new or upcoming content in journals on a specific subject matter. I built one on the subject of Qualitative Research since the design of websites and other information products are increasingly defined by this method of research. Here's how I did it:
Gathering Feeds
- I searched for the websites of publishers, university presses, and database aggregators.
- Once on a publisher's or a specific journal's website, I looked for signs or symbols that there is syndicated content available. Obvious indications are these orangy signs:
, 
, 
, and 
. The last symbol usually appears on the right corner of the URL window of your FireFox browser if the page's content is syndicated. But these indicators were not readily apparent in several home pages of publishers until I browsed to the individual journal titles. - Many publishers offer a feed of the table of contents of the current issue or of recent issues. I clicked on the feed link for the current issue and copied and stored the URL (or bookmarked it as I gathered more).
Entering feed URLs in Drupal
[note: this is only for Drupal users with administrator privileges]
- I logged in to my Drupal account and went to administer >> aggregator.
- I created a category.
- Clicked the add category tab.
- Typed in the title (required) and some description (optional).
- Clicked Submit.
- I added feeds to a category.
- Clicked the add feed tab.
- Entered a journal title and its feed URL (both required).
- Selected the category 'Qualitative Research' which now appears in the list of categories that can be selected (you can select more than one category).
- Selected an update interval (depending on how often a new issue of the journal is published). This functionality requires crontab which I will write about shortly.
- Clicked Submit.
Displaying the feeds
...to be continued.