Basic overview of Drupal, given at the Northwest Ohio PHP User Group

1. Drupal NWO-PUG CMS Shootout April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 1 E-mail: chris@ctankersley.com Twitter: @dragonmantank Identi.ca: dragonmantank

2. Who Are You and Why Are You In My House? Chris Tankersley Doing PHP for 8 Years Lots of projects no one uses, and a few that some do TL;DR https://github.com/dragonmantank April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 2

3. Drupal Web Application Framework Open-Sourced in 2001 by Dries Buytaert As of April 17, had 367,865 registered sites Estimated 1.5% of all websites, which is around 2.8 million Powers websites from basic blogs all the way to government websites Gigantic user community Functional, but moving toward OOP April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 3

4. Nodes/Entities What Everything Is April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 4

5. You Must Assimilate Data is stored in Drupal as Nodes (Drupal 6) or Entities (Drupal 7) Posts, Images, Users, etc, are all the same thing, just different characteristics Nodes are great in theory, a pain in practice Drupal 7 went one level below nodes and created Entities. Same idea, better implementation April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 5

6. Working With Nodes All nodes have the same basic layout All nodes invoke the same hooks This means you have to do this: April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 6

7. Hook System How Everything Works April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 7

8. There’s a Hook for That Drupal uses a system of predefined ‘hooks’ for developers to attach to Hooks allow developers to attach to almost anything that Drupal does What to do something when a thing is deleted? Hook into ‘hook_delete’ Very powerful, but very steep learning curve April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 8

9. Hooking Into A Hook Find the hook you want (‘hook_delete’) Add your module name in place of Hook April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 9

10. Log a Node Deletion April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 10

11. Modules Bending Drupal To Our Will April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 11

12. Hooks, Hook, Hooks Modules are collections of Functions that implement Hooks Contains a .info file with the module information Contains a .module with all the functions April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 12

13. Modules In Drupal’s Lifecycle Drupal kicks up and figures out what the user wants to do Drupal invokes the main hook Main hook calls all registered hooks Hooks all return data, and Drupal finally finishes the original hook out April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 13

14. Modules = Hook Registration Really, ‘modules’ just allow you an easy way to enable/disable what code runs during the lifecycle April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 14

15. Themes Making it look purdy April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 15

16. Anatomy of a Theme Basically a specialized Module Folder contains PHP files, CSS, and JS Instead of hooking into Hooks, you hook into Templates April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 16

17. Build From Foundations Drupal has many great Foundation Themes Download, Install, and modify CSS/JS to get going faster April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 17

18. Taking the Good with the Bad There are some downsides… April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 18

19. Performance All registered hooks always fire The more modules you have, the longer Drupal has to process 100 modules that hook into hook_delete fire every time hook_delete is fired, regardless of the situation Drupal is coded for developers, not sysadmins April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 19

20. The Admin Interface Sucks April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 20

21. The Admin Interface Can be hard to find things Community has tried to fix this with plugins I still find it a pain April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 21

22. Learning Curve It’s there, and it’s big API Documentation is there, but hard to find what you want When you have 100’s of hooks, you kinda guess what you want Hard to find intermediate-advanced tutorials Lot of it is ‘Install this Module!’ instead of architecture April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 22

23. Backward Compatibility Major Revisions break Backward Compatibility Makes for Slow Adoption of new releases Drupal 6 -> 7 is painful because many modules just didn’t work Drupal 7 -> 8 probably will be too April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 23

24. Questions? April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 24

25. Links Where to Find Stuff I Talked About April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 25

26. Links Drupal Main Site: http://www.drupal.org API Site: http://api.drupal.org Contributions: http://drupal.org/download Creating Themes: http://tips.webdesign10.com/how-to-make-a-drupal-theme April 26, 2011 NWO-PUG 26