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CHAPTER 3 USING THE DRUPAL CORE MODULES Filter Module The Filter module manages the filters and input formats that it and other modules define. As explained in Chapter 2, filters process all content before it is displayed in the browser. They can do interesting things such as prevent unwanted or dangerous code or scripts from being executed, parse wiki syntax or other forms of markup, convert line breaks to HTML
tags, and detect e-mail addresses or URLs in the text and convert them into hyperlinks. The Filter module is a required module and is enabled automatically. You can configure it by selecting administer . input formats (admin/filters). Configuring this module was covered in Chapter 2. Forum Module Forums are one of the most popular formats for group discussion on the Internet and often form an online community of their own. Most Web users are accustomed to some flavor of discussion forum. Drupal is equipped with a flexible Forum module, which you can configure to suit a number of different approaches to forums, leveraging the entire range of standard Drupal features such as categories, file uploads, and content filtering. After you enable the Forum module, you must define some forums and optionally, some containers. Additionally, since a forum topic consists of a content node and comments, the configuration of the Comment module plays a large role in how your forums look and behave. The configuration page for comments is admin/comment/configure. See Chapter 2 for details on configuring comments. Configuring Containers and Forums To access the forum configuration page, select administer . forums (admin/forum). This page has three tabs: Add Container, Add Forum, and Configure. Containers are groups of forums and, though they aren t necessary, they lend a nice bit of organization or overview to your forums, especially if you have more than a couple forums. Containers are a means of organizing your forums by topic. Topics cannot be posted to containers; containers are merely for organizing forums. Note On Drupal.org, you can see the application of containers on the forums page (http:// www.drupal.org/forum). The containers are General, Support, and Development, and they are visually set apart from the individual forum topics. The actual topics, or threads, can be posted to the forums. Select the Add Container tab to view the form to add a new container. The contents of the Container Name and Description fields will be visible to users in the forum overview. Use the Parent and Weight fields to place the container in the hierarchy. Containers are best left at the top level. Once you have defined your containers (or decided you don t need any), you can define your forums. Select the Add Forum tab to add forums. This page is identical to the one for adding containers. Although it is possible to add a forum with another forum as its parent, it is more logical to have all of your forums be either top-level or the child of a
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CHAPTER 3 USING THE DRUPAL CORE MODULES Running a Directory Server The Drupal module offers a simple service by which other Drupal sites can announce their existence or ping a central server on a regular basis. While there are many possible applications of such a service, the most common use is along the lines of the now defunct Drupal Sites page on Drupal.org, which was simply a long list of sites that run Drupal. Note CivicSpaceLabs.org uses the directory server to generate a list of sites running CivicSpace (which is based on Drupal): http://civicspacelabs.org/home/directory. In practice, any site that has the Drupal module enabled can function as a directory server. When another site pings the site, the remote site s name, slogan, and mission are added to the list of sites. For example, you might use a directory server on a college or university where individual labs or departments are setting up many different Drupal sites. Each one could ping a central server at the university to compile a list of all the various sites as they come online. In its current state, the directory server service lacks some basic features: the administrator cannot block a certain site from pinging and being added to the list, and the administrator cannot limit the incoming pings to a certain set of domains or IP addresses. Note The promise of truly secure and flexible distributed authentication is very attractive. If you are interested in helping the Drupal team fix the current shortcomings of the Drupal module and develop a top- notch solution, please join us at Drupal.org. Your help is welcome. Configuring the Drupal Module After you enable the Drupal module, you can access its settings at admin/settings/drupal. This page contains the following fields: The Drupal XML-RPC Server field is the path to the XML-RPC endpoint for the directory server. This is typically http://site_url/xmlrpc.php. The Drupal Directory field determines whether the site will ping the directory server every time scheduled tasks are run with cron.php. Distributed authentication does not depend on this being enabled; it is fully functional as soon as the Drupal module is turned on. In order for your site to be listed in the remote Drupal directory, the Name, Slogan, and Mission field on the admin/settings page of your site must be set.
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CHAPTER 3 USING THE DRUPAL CORE MODULES Drupal Module Drupal offers a system of distributed authentication that allows people to use the same username and password at multiple sites. The sites communicate with each other to check authentication credentials and to decide whether a username and password combination should be allowed or denied. This is called distributed authentication. If you want your site to have this feature, you need to enable the Drupal module. The Drupal module also lets you run Drupal as a directory server that receives ping notification from other Drupal sites, creating a listing of sites. Note At the time this was written, a lively debate was unfolding on Drupal.org about the future of the Drupal module (http://drupal.org/node/31716). It is worth checking up on this thread to see where the issue stands. Using Distributed Authentication Drupal distributed authentication is a way to save site users the extra steps of creating redundant accounts on multiple sites. With distributed authentication, users can register on one site, and then use an extended version of their login information to log in to any site that supports Drupal distributed authentication. This is not only convenient for users, but it s also useful in situations where sites want to maintain a shared user base but not a shared database. When logging in to a Drupal site using distributed authentication, your username takes on an extended form that includes the site that is expected to do the actual authenticating. The extended username takes the form username@www.domain.com. For example, if Bob is a registered user at www.bobs-site.orgwith the username bob, his extended username is bob@www.bobs-site.org, and his password remains unchanged. When Bob uses this extended username to log in to another Drupal-powered site, that site will send a request to Bob s original site, www.bobs-site.com, and ask it if a user bob with the password that he entered should be authenticated. You should be aware that the current implementation of distributed authentication raises some security concerns. Someone could alter the code of her site to save a record of the passwords of users who log in. This is true of any web site you visit, not just Drupal. As long as the username and password only buys access to just that site, there is little incentive to do this. If, however, it would allow the malicious person to log in to other sites as well in this case, any Drupal site that has the Drupal module enabled the incentive is greater, and so is the potential loss or damage. The attacker would be able to masquerade on those sites using your user identity and execute actions on your behalf. Caution Drupal s distributed authentication is inherently insecure. If you do not know that you can trust the owner(s) of a particular site, never use your distributed authentication (Drupal ID) to log in to it.
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CHAPTER 3 USING THE DRUPAL CORE MODULES Comment Module The Comment module adds the ability to allow users to comment on any content node type. With options for the display format, as well as the publishing workflow, the Comment module gives your site a large amount of flexibility in configuring user comments. Comments and configuring the Comment module were covered in Chapter 2. Contact Module The Contact module provides a personal contact form for every registered user. This form lets people send e-mail messages to each other without publishing their e-mail addresses on the web site. Each user can decide whether he wants to enable his contact form. The Contact module also provides a form for contacting the site administrator, the sitewide contact form, which serves as a simple and effective way to gather feedback. Using the Personal Contact Form When the Contact module is enabled, a Contact tab (user/uid/contact) will be visible on each user s profile screen. Users can enable their personal contact form from their user account editing page by checking the Personal Contact Form field in the Contact Settings section. When a user has allowed it, other registered users can send him messages via the Contact tab. There is a limit on the number of messages users can send per hour, to prevent abuse. Using the Sitewide Contact Form The sitewide contact form (Drupal path contact) is quite useful because you can set up a number of categories that users can choose from before they submit the form. Depending on which category they choose, the contact e-mail can be sent to different addresses, allowing support questions to go to support@yoursite.com, suggestions to suggestions@yoursite.com, and so forth. You can also configure the sitewide contact form to send these e-mail messages to multiple recipients. To set up categories that people can choose from, choose administer . contact (admin/contact). The Add Category tab on this page takes you to a form with three fields: The Category field identifies the purpose of the mail that the user is sending, as well as determines who will receive it. The Recipients field is for the contact e-mail address. If more than one e-mail address is to receive the mail, enter them here separated by commas. Every time a user submits the sitewide contact form for this category, all of these e-mail addresses will receive the message. The Auto-reply field is for an optional message that will be mailed to the user s e-mail address, possibly thanking him for his submission or relaying other information. If you leave this field empty, no auto-reply e-mail will be sent. If you would like to have a contact us link in your navigation menu, and you have the Menu module enabled, select administer . menus (admin/menu) to access the list of enabled and disabled menu items. One of the disabled items is contact us. Enable this menu item, and the link will appear in your navigation menu.
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CHAPTER 3 USING THE DRUPAL CORE MODULES Viewing Book Pages The book page content type has a number of alternative views, including the following: The print-friendly version strips out design elements from your web site and presents the content in a way that is more efficient for printing pages on paper. The export DocBook XML view produces an XML document from your content, which can be used by other tools that read DocBook XML documents. The export OPML view presents the content in the book outline in Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) format for viewing and editing with OPML-compatible tools. The DocBook XML and OPML export views are a step toward being able to create and edit structured web site content offline, which is useful if you intend to create flyers, brochures, or treeware books. Note See http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ for more information about DocBook XML and http://www.opml.org/ for details on OPML. Note that the Drupal 4.7 core functionality does not support importing content via OPML or DocBook XML. The Book module generates a new block, which you can enable from the block administration page (admin/block). The book navigation block, shown in Figure 3-2, appears on the page with any node that is in a book outline. It displays a fragment of the book outline relative to the current node, including the parent s lineage up to the top-level node and all of the current node s children. This makes navigating in the book hierarchy especially easy. Figure 3-2. The book navigation block in the left sidebar displays a fragment of the book outline
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CHAPTER 3 USING THE DRUPAL CORE MODULES The Book module introduces three permissions: Create Book Pages, Edit Own Book Pages, and Maintain Books. The Create Book Pages and Edit Own Book Pages permissions are self- explanatory and deal with only the book page content type. Users with the Maintain Books permission can edit book pages that are not their own, and they can put posts of any content type (and from any author) into the book outline hierarchy. Working with the Book Outline Select administer . content . books (admin/node/book) to see an overview of all the books. Clicking the outline link for any of the books will bring you to a page that details the hierarchical structure of that book, including all of the book pages and other content types that have been added to the outline, as shown in Figure 3-1. Figure 3-1. The book outline Besides providing an overview of the book hierarchy, the outline view offers a convenient way to adjust the weights for the various content nodes so that they are in the desired order. The additional link orphan pages (admin/node/book/orphan) will identify any nodes that were once children in the book outline but now have no parent because the parent node was deleted. Where the Book module really starts to display its power is with content node types other than book pages. With the Book module enabled, you can add any content type to the book outline. For users who have the Create Book Pages permission, all content nodes will have a new Outline tab, which they can use to add that node to a book outline. Furthermore, any node that is in the book outline will have an add child page link, which makes a book page a descendent from the current page in the book hierarchy. These tools can be used to organize all of the content on your site into logical groups and hierarchies that can be navigated sequentially using the previous and next links.
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CHAPTER 3 USING THE DRUPAL CORE MODULES Table 3-1. Some XML-RPC Publishing Tools Program Operating System Web Site w.bloggar Windows http://www.wbloggar.com/ ecto Windows, Mac OS X http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/ iBlog MacOSX http://www.iblog.com/home.php BlogApp Mac OS X http://www.objectivelabs.com/blogapp.php MarsEdit Mac OS X http://www.ranchero.com/marsedit BloGTK GNU/Linux http://blogtk.sourceforge.net/ BlogniX GNU/Linux http://blognix.sourceforge.net/ Book Module The Book module is one of the most useful of all Drupal modules due to its ability to add a high level of structure and organization to the content on your site. Its main function is to maintain a hierarchy of content and to offer a means of ordered navigation between them. These are the familiar previous, next, and up links that you can see at Drupal.org in the handbook (for example, at http://drupal.org/node/22963). Furthermore, the Book module has a content type of its own, called book pages. Using Book Pages The book page was created for use on Drupal.org to facilitate the collaborative creation and editing of documentation. In order to give everyone the chance to contribute to the Drupal handbooks (http://drupal.org/handbooks), it was necessary to let all site users make new book pages and edit existing pages. The danger, of course, is that not everyone writes good documentation, and some people might even do malicious things like delete or deface the existing documentation, so some level of moderation was needed. The solution was that any new book pages and any revisions of existing book pages would be subject to approval by a moderator. When an existing book page gets edited, the changes are saved as a revision, and the original version of the page continues to be displayed on the site. The book page content type differs from other content types in a number of subtle yet important ways. In addition to the Title and Body fields, which are common to other types such as blogs, pages, and stories, the page for creating book type content has the following fields: The Parent field controls the page s position within the overall hierarchy. A book is defined as a content node that lives at the top level of the book hierarchy (has no parent) and all of its children. This is achieved by choosing as the value for the Parent field. The Weight field controls the order of pages within a particular level of the hierarchy. As usual, content with lighter weights (smaller numbers) will appear before content with heavier weights (larger numbers). The Log Message field is intended to be used as part of a collaborative editing workflow that makes book pages unique among content types. Someone making an edit can use this field to indicate to the moderators or other editors what was changed and why.
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CHAPTER 3 USING THE DRUPAL CORE MODULES Accessing Blogs Each blogger has a path that lists all of her personal blog entries. This path always follows the pattern blog/uid where uid is that user s ID number. The Drupal path blog will display a page with all blog entries from all users, providing a useful overview of all blogging activity. RSS 2.0 feeds are provided for each individual s blog, as well as for the blog page that lists all blog entries. A user s blog feed can be accessed using the path blog/uid/feed, and the feed for all blogs is blog/feed. Blog posts that are promoted to the front page will appear in the site s main feed as well. BlogAPI Module Publishing to a web site by using a web browser has its limitations. Despite the progress that has been made in developing WYSIWYG editors such as TinyMCE, it is still not as comfortable to type and format large portions of text as it is using a word processing program such as OpenOffice. Furthermore, it is impossible to use a browser to compose to a web site when not connected to the Internet, so working on your blogs offline isn t an option. Finally, if you maintain blogs on many different web sites, the interface may be different for each one, making the whole process take much more time and effort than necessary. The BlogAPI module, in conjunction with desktop blogging tools such as ecto, w.bloggar, or iBlog, addresses these weaknesses and opens up the possibility of editing your blog posts offline using comfortable text editing programs. Note You could, of course, use a program like OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org) to edit your blog posts offline, which may be more comfortable than using a program like ecto, even though you would need to copy and paste your work into the browser. Configuring BlogAPI Enable the BlogAPI module and configure it from the admin/settings/blogapi page, which has only one field to configure. The Blog Types field allows you to select the blog content types to publish. The BlogAPI module allows you to create virtually any content type from your desktop publishing client. If you select more than one type of content in the Blog Types field, your blogging client will later give you the choice of which blog to publish to. This refers to which content type you wish to create. Publishing to Your Site Using BlogAPI Table 3-1 lists some of the programs that you can use to publish to your Drupal site using the BlogAPI module.
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CHAPTER 3 USING THE DRUPAL CORE MODULES Block Module The Block module is responsible for managing blocks, which are units of content provided by the various modules or added by the administrator. Blocks added by the administrator are called custom blocks, and they can contain HTML or PHP code. Details on using blocks and configuring the Block module were presented in Chapter 2. There, you learned that blocks can appear in any of the default regions of the screen (left and right sidebars, the header, the footer, and the main content area) or in administrator-defined regions, which will be covered in Chapter 5. You can also configure blocks to appear on some pages but not others. The Block module defines one permission, Administer Blocks, which allows a user role to create, position, and configure blocks. Blog Module Drupal is a pioneer in the area of multiuser blogging. With your Drupal site, each registered user can have a blog. Bloggers receive their own blog URL, which displays all of their blog posts, yet the content created by the individual users can appear elsewhere on the site as well. This feature makes Drupal an excellent choice for bridging the gap between individual blogs and an online community. Configuring Blogs To get started with the Blog module, you need to assign the Edit Own Blog permission to the user roles that should be able to maintain individual blogs. Users with the proper permissions can then create new blog entries using the create content . personal blog entry link. As with all other Drupal content, you can categorize blogs (with the Taxonomy module). Additionally, blogs can have file uploads (thanks to the Upload module), store revision history, be promoted to the front page, and have comments. Chapter 2 details these configuration settings. The blogging experience can be enhanced further with the help of a number of contributed modules and external tools. The BlogAPI module, described in the next section, allows users to post to their blogs using popular desktop tools such as ecto (http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/), w.bloggar (http://www.wbloggar.com/), and iBlog (http://www.iblog.com/home.php). In addition, the following contributed modules enhance the blog module s functionality: TrackBack support (a method of notification about the citation or referencing of blog posts between web sites) can be added by installing the TrackBack module: http:// drupal.org/project/trackback. Every blog can have a different theme with the Blog Theme module: http://drupal.org/ node/19248. Blogroll functionality (for managing lists of links to other blogs and sites) is added with the Blogroll module: http://drupal.org/project/blogroll.
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CHAPTER 3 USING THE DRUPAL CORE MODULES Categorizing Feeds The Aggregator module also allows you to categorize your feeds so that they can be grouped by topic or area of interest. To add a feed category, return to the Aggregator s main administration page and click the Add Category tab (admin/aggregator/add/category). Add as many categories as you want. Now, whenever you create a new feed or edit an existing feed, you will be given the chance to categorize the feed based on the categories you just created. Furthermore, the various categories have their own listing pages. Click the news aggregator menu item (Drupal path aggregator), and you will see that the categories now appear as menu items below the news aggregator item. Sometimes, categorizing an entire feed isn t really accurate enough. Perhaps your favorite blog author who usually writes about politics suddenly decides to include a blog post about cooking. Fortunately, Drupal offers a mechanism for categorizing the individual feed items as well: the Categorize tab from any individual feed s page (aggregator/sources/feed_id/categorize). This gives you fine-grained control over which items appear in which categories. Setting Permissions The Aggregator module defines two permissions: Access News Feeds and Administer News Feed. The final step in configuring your news feeds is assigning the appropriate permissions to user roles. As explained in Chapter 2, you set permissions by navigating to administer . access control page (admin/access). Viewing Feeds The Aggregator module provides many different options for viewing the feeds. If you navigate to the block administration page (admin/block), you ll see that every feed and feed category can be shown in a block. Blocks showing feeds offer an additional convenience feature in conjunction with the Blog module. When the Blog module is enabled, feed items in blocks appear with a b: icon next to them. Clicking this icon is a convenient way to create a new blog entry that cites the feed item and provides a link to the original source. This is a very user-friendly feature that encourages your site s bloggers to write about the things they read in the feed items. Once you have configured news sources (feeds), the news aggregator link in the main menu will show a submenu labeled sources (aggregator/sources), which leads to a page where the feed items are grouped by source. If you have categorized your feeds, you ll also see the submenu item categories (aggregator/categories), with the feed items grouped by category. Archive Module The Archive module presents a calendar view of your site s content and a searching mechanism. Days on which content was submitted show as a link to those entries. After you enable the Archive module, you ll see a Calendar to Browse Archives block, which you can configure to show the calendar. The path to any given day in the archive takes the form archive/year/month/day. To see the content from April 23, 2005, for example, use the path archive/2005/4/23.
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