The OSTraining Blog - Web Design News and Tutorials

Creating RSS Feeds in Drupal Using Views

This tutorial will show you how to create a custom RSS feed in Drupal. To do this you'll need to have the Views module uploaded and installed.

Add a New View

Click Administer > Site building > Views > Add

Enter a name for your new RSS feed, choose "Node" and then click "Next"

Create an RSS Feed View

On the left-hand side, choose "Feed" from the dropdown and click "Add display".

Choose the Types of Node Shown in Your RSS Feed

On the right-hand side, click the + icon next to "Filters". Choose "Node" from the dropdown menu and then check the box called "Node: Type". Click "Add".

Choose the node types that you want to include in your RSS feed and then click "Update default display".

Choose the Parts of the Node Shown in Your RSS Feed

On the middle of the Views screen, click the + icon next to "Fields". Choose "Node" from the dropdown menu and then check the box called "Node: Title". Click "Add".

You can change some of the setting for the RSS feed display here, but the first time you do this its best to click "Update" and move on.

Set the Path of Your RSS Feed

At the bottom left of the Views screen, click the "None" text next to "Path". Enter a path (URL) for your RSS feed and click "Update".

Set the Style of Your RSS Feed

At the top left of the Views screen, click "Missing style plugins" next to "Row style". Click "Update".

View Your Completed RSS Feed

Click "View "Feed"" in the top-right corner of the Views screen.

Your RSS feed should be ready!

Using the Flutter Plugin for Wordpress

Flutter is a Wordpress plugin that allows you to move beyond simple posts and pages in Wordpress. You can create different types of pages with different types of content. In this example we're going to emulate IMDB.com and list movies together with details about the movie.

Install Flutter

Go to Plugins >> Add New and search for "Flutter". Click "Install" on the right hand side of the page, click "Install" again and then "Activate Plugin".

Browse to Flutter

Flutter adds two areas to your Wordpress admin screen. Under "Settings" you'll find "Flutter" which is the main configuration for the plugin. There will also be a whole new area called "Flutter" which is where you will add content.

Create a Write Panel

Click on "Write Panels" and then "Create Write Panel". You can choose different options for your panel. For example, to simplify things for your users you can unpublish custom fields, password, excerpt and other features that are confusing for beginners. Click "Finish" when you're done.

Add Fields to Your New Write Panel

If you'd like to you can group your fields into different areas. For Movies, you might have a group of fields called "People" and inside that fields called "Director", "Cinematographer" and so on. You might also have a group of fields called "Details" and inside that fields called "Release Date", "Genre" and so on. We're going to set that up and click on "Create a Group".

Name Your Group

Create Fields

Enter the Field Details

Flutter will offer you all sorts of options for the field. A "Textbox" is a simple one-line text field but you can also allow people to write in a larger area (Multiline textbox) multiple choices (Checkbox List, Radiobutton List) or even to upload files or images (useful in example to upload movies posters for example). Choose your options then click "Continue" and "Finish".

Add More Fields

See if you can go ahead and create extra fields and one extra group so that your "Movies" Write Panel looks like the image above.

Go and Start Writing

You'll see that Flutter has added a new option called "Movies" at the top left, underneath "Posts". Click "New" to start writing.

Enter Information Into Your Fields

The post page will look just as it does normally with just one exception ... your Flutter fields will show at the bottom of the page. View your post on the front of your site and your fields should be visible.

Adding a New Drupal Block Position

We're going to be adding a block position to a Drupal 6 theme called ShallowGrunge: http://drupal.org/project/shallowgrunge

The Goal

One of our students wanted to put a block position inside the red header bar. If you haven't done so already, download and install ShallowGrunge: http://drupal.org/project/shallowgrunge

The Current Blocks

Currently there is only a "content" and a "right sidebar" region.

Finding Where to Insert

I'm using the WebDeveloper toolbar for Firefox to help me identify the red header bar's area. I click on CSS >> View Style Information and then click on the area. The toolbar tells me that the area is called #menu

Opening the Files

In your site files, navigate to sites / all / themes / shallowgrunge / shallowgrunge.info and open that file

Add the Region Name

This file contains all the information Drupal needs to know about the theme. Now we're going to tell it about our new region. Currently only two regions are defined in this file. You'll need to add another using this line: regions[header] = Header

Open page.tpl.php

The file that controls the layout of our theme is page.tpl.php so let's open that up.

Add the Region Code

We scroll down in the file until we find the div called "menu" and we can insert our block code into there. The syntax is:

Check Your New Region

Check back in Administer >> Site building >> Blocks and your new "header" region should show.

Hiding a Wordpress Site from Search Engines

This tutorial shows an easy way to work on a Wordpress site without taking it live. There is a setting that makes the search engines ignore the site until you are ready. Be careful to turn this back on when you're ready to launch. I've seen some big sites for big companies launch with this enabled ... everyone was sitting around wondering why they had no traffic.

Login to Your Wordpress Site

Go to Settings >> Privacy

Finally set Blog Visibility to "I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors" and your site will be hidden from Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Adding a Slideshow to Drupal

This week's tutorial was requested by a student in our Drupal forum. They wanted to know how to add a slideshow to their Drupal site.

We recommend a module called Content Glider which allows you to show a slideshow in a block.

Installing Content Glider to Your Drupal Site

Step 1: Visit http://drupal.org/project/content_glider to download the latest version of "Content Glider".
Step 2: Extract the files into a folders on your desktop. The folder will be called "content_glider".
Step 3: Login to your site's files via FTP and navigate to /sites/all/. If there isn't a folder called /modules/ here, create one.
Step 4: Upload the "content_glider" folder to /sites/all/modules/
Step 5: Go to Administer >> Site building >> Modules and enable Content Glider.

Configuring Content Glider

Step 1: It's best to create a new content type for the slideshow, so we don't get mixed up with our other nodes.

Go to Administer >> Content Management >> Content Types
Click "Add Content Type" and create a type called "slideshow"

Step 2: Now we can go and configure Content Glider:

Go to Administer >> Site Configuration >> Content Glider
Put "slideshow" into the "Content type for Glider 1:" field.
Click "Save Configuration.

Step 3: Next, let's make Content Glider live on our site:

Go to Administer >> Site Building >> Blocks
Publish the "Content Slider 1" block onto your site.

Step 4: Finally we can create the content for the slideshow.

Go to Create Content >> Slideshow
Start adding the nodes that will appear in your slideshow ...

Creating a Workflow for Drupal Users

This week's tutorial is the second of a two-parter. We've had several students in our classes looking to build websites with multiple content authors ... blogs, newspapers, university sites and more. A common request is to improve Drupal's default handling of nodes.

In the first part we covered how to give people easy to a list of their own nodes, using a module called workspace.

In this second part we're going to create a workflow, allowing you to choose who has control over a node. A newspaper website is a great example - a writer may submit an article which is then passed to the copy-editor for checking and then to the editor for approval and publication.

In Part 1 we used the "Workspace" module. This time we're using the "Workflow" module.

Installing Workflow to Your Drupal Site

Step 1: Visit http://drupal.org/project/workflow to download the latest version of "Workflow".
Step 2: Extract the files into a folders on your desktop. The folder will be called "workflow".
Step 3: Login to your site's files via FTP and navigate to /sites/all/. If there isn't a folder called /modules/ here, create one.
Step 4: Upload the "workflow" folder to /sites/all/modules/
Step 5: Go to Administer >> Site building >> Modules and enable Workspace.

Configuring Workflow

Go to Administer >> Site building >> Workflow and click "Add workflow". You'll be at the start of the process:

Workflow name: Enter a name for your workflow.
Workflow states: You'll be asked for the different stages of the workflow. They example used by the module is "if you were doing a meal workflow it may include states like shop, prepare, eat, and clean up." Ideally you'll have several states. This is an example that a newspaper might use:
Nodes: You can then choose which nodes your workflow applies to:
Moving Through the Workflow: Click "Edit" next to your workflow and you'll be able to choose which user groups are in control at which stage. The workflow moves from left to right and you are choosing who can initiate the transition from one stage to the next.
Managing Nodes in the Workflow: At the very bottom of this page you can decide what control people have over the articles in each state:
Tab: Mid-way on this screen you'll find "Workflow tab permissions" and you can control who sees the "Workflow" tab when they're looking at a node. This is how your users will move article through the workflow. At the top of the nodes they will see this added tab:
Using the Workflow: Once users click on the Workflow tab, they'll be able to change the state of the article and decide when:

Allow Drupal Users to Manage Their Own Content

This week's tutorial is the first of a two-parter. We've had several students in our classes looking to build websites with multiple content authors ... blogs, newspapers, university sites and more. A common request is to improve Drupal's default handling of nodes.

This week we'll show you how to give each person their own control panel for their nodes. This will allow them to much more easily see, understand and update the content they've submitted. Without it they'd be reduced to searching and guessing their way through the site to find their content.

Next week we'll focus on how to create a workflow and allow nodes to pass through several approval steps before publication.

In order to give each person their own control we're going to use a module called "Workspace":

Installing Workspace to Your Drupal Site

Step 1: Visit http://drupal.org/project/workspace to download the latest version of "Workspace".
Step 2: Extract the files into a folders on your desktop. The folder will be called "workspace".
Step 3: Login to your site's files via FTP and navigate to /sites/all/. If there isn't a folder called /modules/ here, create one.
Step 4: Upload the "workspace" folder to /sites/all/modules/
Step 5: Go to Administer >> Site building >> Modules and enable Workspace. You'll need to check only one box.
Step 6: When your users login they'll see a link in the admin menu called "My Workspace". When they click on it they'll see a screen like this:

Drupal Workspace Module

From this screen your users will be able to search for all their nodes, just as you search through them from Administer >> Content Management >> Content.

Automatically Update All Your Social Networks From Drupal

Would you like to be able to update your Drupal site and automatically send those updates to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, Ning and dozens of other sites?

This tutorial will show you how.

Our first part will be to create an RSS feed to export new posts. From there we'll use Twitterfeed.com and Ping.fm to distribute the posts to all our social networks.

Creating an RSS Feed

There are at least three ways you export an RSS feed from your Drupal site. We'll break the options into easy, medium and hard:

Easy: You can just use Drupal's default feed. Simply add rss.xml to site's address. For example the main Drupal.org feed is at http://drupal.org/rss.xml. The downside is that you don't have much control of the feed's content. Whatever is on your site's frontpage will be included.

Medium: A module called "Syndication" will give you more control"

Step 1: Visit http://drupal.org/project/syndication to download the latest version of "Syndication".
Step 3: Extract the files into a folders on your desktop. The folder will be called "syndication".
Step 4: Login to your site's files via FTP and navigate to /sites/all/. If there isn't a folder called /modules/ here, create one.
Step 5: Upload the "syndication" folder to /sites/all/modules/
Step 6: Go to Administer >> Site building >> Modules and enable "Syndication".
Step 7: In your admin menu you should now see an option called "RSS Feeds". Click on this menu link and you'll be able to create custom feeds based on either particular taxonomies or on particular blogs from the Blogs module.

Hard: You can use the "Views" module to completely customize your RSS feed. Full instructions are here.

Whichever route you use, the key is to end up with a URL for your feed at the end. Keep that safe and we'll use in a few minutes.

Sending your Feed to Twitter and Facebook

Step 8: We're going to use a service called Twitterfeed to send our news automatically to both Twitter and Facebook. The first step is to visit Twitterfeed.com and register.
Step 9: Login to Twitterfeed and click "Create New Feed".
Step 10: You'll see a box like the one below. Enter the title, and then paste the RSS feed from Step 6:

feed url

Step 11: Click "test rss feed" to make sure everything is OK. If it is, click "Continue to Step 2".
Step 12: This next part allows you to send your feed to Twitter and Facebook amongst other options:
Step 13: Twitter and Facebook will allow you to authenticate your accounts and link them to Twitterfeed directly from this page. You can also add "UTM" tags which are designed for Google Analytics. They will show in your analytics results, so you can see how much traffic has been sent from Twitter or Facebook.
Step 14: The final step is a really powerful feature here that many people overlook ... Ping.fm. If you create an account and authenticate it here with Twitterfeed, you can then pass on your updates to Linkedin.com, MySpace.com, Ning.com and dozens of others. There is a full list available here.

Adding Metadata to Drupal Nodes

This week's tutorial explains how to add metadata to your Drupal site. By default, Drupal has no fields for metadata. Check the source code at http://drupal.org and you'll see what I mean. To fix that issue, we recommend a module called Nodewords.

Installing Nodewords to Your Drupal Site

Step 1: Visit http://drupal.org/project/nodewords to download the latest version of "Nodewords".
Step 3: Extract the files into a folders on your desktop. The folder will be called "nodewords".
Step 4: Login to your site's files via FTP and navigate to /sites/all/. If there isn't a folder called /modules/ here, create one.
Step 5: Upload the "nodewords" folder to /sites/all/modules/
Step 6: Go to Administer >> Site building >> Modules. You'll need to check only the first two of the four boxes if you'd like to add regular metadata:
Step 7: Go and create a new node. When you do, you should notice a new area labelled "Meta tags" and you'll be able to add metadata to all your nodes:
Step 8: You can also give the search engines information about how this page should be crawled, by using the "Robots" checkboxes. These are the messages you can send to Google or Yahoo:
- NOARCHIVE ... don't store a cache version of this page in your search results.
- NOFOLLOW ... don't give any value to the outbound links on this page.
- NOINDEX ... don't index this page in search results.
- NOODP ... don't use any information from DMOZ.org to describe this site.
- NOSNIPPET ... don't show any of this text on this page in your search results.
- NOYDIR ... don't use any information from Yahoo Directory to describe this site.

Configuring Nodewords

The default Nodewords settings might not be to everyone's taste. There is no short cut to the Nodewords editing page, unless you to to Administer >> By Module >> Nodewords >> Meta tags. There you can choose global settings for your site's metatdata.

Importing RSS Feeds Into Wordpress Posts

This tutorial will show you how to take an RSS feed and import it into your Wordpress site. Each item on the RSS feed will become a separate Wordpress post. We use this technique for a couple purposes:

Distributing our content to other Wordpress sites.
Importing blogs and news on a particular topic from other sites. This way people can read them all in one place.

We're going to use a plugin called FeedWordPress.

Installing and Configuring FeedWordPress

Step 1: Go to the FeedWordPress page on Wordpress.org and download the file.
Step 2: Extract the files into a folder on your desktop. The folder will be called, unsurprisingly "feedwordpress"
Step 3: Login to your site's files via FTP and navigate to /wp-content/plugins/.
Step 4: Upload the "feedwordpress" folder to /wp-content/plugins/.
Step 5: Go to wp-admin >> Plugins and click "Activate" under "FeedWordPress".
Step 6: Once you've enabled it, you'll see a new tab on the sidebar called "Syndication". Click the first link called "Syndication". You'll see a screen like below:
Step 7: Enter your RSS feed into the box called "Add new source" and click "Syndicate"
Step 8: FeedWordPress will check the feed and if it's valid, you can click "Use this Feed" to import the posts.

Importing the RSS Feeds

Now that you're set up, there are two ways to import feeds:

Manually: If you'd like to manually import feeds, go the "Syndication" link, check the feeds and click "Update Checked".
Automatically: If you'd like to manually import feeds, go the "Feed and Updates" link and FeedWordPress will show you how to give you instructions to set-up a cron job.

Improving Drupal's Clean URLs with the Pathauto Module

This tutorial was requested by a student who is learning the Drupal basics. They turned on "Clean URLs" in the Drupal admin area and were surprised to see that the URLs remained largely unchanged:

Old: /?q=node/3
New: /node/3

The student's comment was:

"that's still a silly address for my About Us page. I want the address to be /about-us/."

We also tried to help them by turning on the Path module in the Drupal core. That allowed them to create URLs like /about-us/ however they still needed to think about it and ask their users to create a path every time. They wanted something that would create great URLs automatically.

The solution is the "Pathauto" module and let's show you how to set it up:

Installing Pathauto to Your Drupal Site

In fact, we're going to install two modules because Pathauto also requires the "Token" module.

Step 1: Go to Administer >> Site configuration >> Clean URLs to check that they are enabled.
Step 2: Click here to download the latest version of "Pathauto" and click here for "Token".
Step 3: Extract the files into a two folders on your desktop. One folder will be called "pathauto" and the other "token".
Step 4: Login to your site's files via FTP and navigate to /sites/all/. If there isn't a folder called /modules/ here, create one.
Step 5: Upload the "sections" folder to /sites/all/modules/
Step 6: Go to Administer >> Site building >> Modules. You'll need to check four boxes:
Step 7: Go and create a new node. When you do, you should notice a new area labelled "URL path settings". If you leave "Automatic alias" checked, the address of the page will likely be your Page title in this format:
/content/your-page-title/

Configuring Pathauto

The default Pathauto setting might not be to everyone's taste:

You may want to use underscores _ instead of dashes as this student did.
You may want to remove /content/ so that you really can have pages with the address /about-us/ rather than /content/about-us/

To change the settings, go to Administer >> Site building >> URL aliases >> Automated Alias Settings:

Drupal Pathauto Settings

First Baptist Church Atlanta Launches Joomla Site

We just had this wonderful email from one of our Joomla training clients. Paulo and his team came to the class knowing nothing about Joomla, but on a

"Just wanted to share our success. :)

Back in December 10,11 we (my coworkers and I) went to a Joomla Training and we had nothing. I think I even told you that we needed the website up by the end of January, and you're like... "that's gonna be hard". Well... it was, but we did it. :)

I'm still implementing more functionality to the site and giving more power to the editors, but we have the site up and running beautifully, with 277 articles, 25 sections, 88 categories, and around 40 editors. The church purchased CommunityACL and It really works well. Every user has access to only their areas and JCE lets them have access to only their folder in the server.

So, that's it... We did it.

Check out: http://www.fba.org

Thanks!

Paulo"

Showing Different Drupal Themes on Different Pages

This tutorial was written after a request in one of this week's Drupal classes: "How do I show different Drupal themes on different pages?". The answer is a module called "Sections":

Installing Sections to Your Drupal Site

Step 1: Click here to download the latest version of "Sections".
Step 2: Extract the files into a folder on your desktop. The folder will be called "sections".
Step 3: Login to your site's files via FTP and navigate to /sites/all/. If there isn't a folder called /modules/ here, create one.
Step 4: Upload the "sections" folder to /sites/all/modules/
Step 5: Go to Administer >> Site building >> Modules. Check the box next to "Sections" and click Save Configuration.

Showing Different Drupal Themes on Different Pages

Now that Sections is set up, we'll be able to use it to place different themes on different pages:

Step 6: Go to Administer >> Site building >> Themes. Make sure that all the themes you want to use are enabled.
Step 7: Go to Administer >> Site building >> Sections and click "Add Sections".
Step 8: Give the section a name, click "enabled" and choose the theme you want to use.
Step 9: At the bottom of the page you'll see an area called "Page specific visibility settings". This is the same option you have with Blocks. Enter the pages you'd like this theme to appear on, click save and you're done!

Add A Dropdown Admin Menu to Your Drupal Site

One of things we often do for our training clients is simplify the admin area for them. There is a module that allows users to manage their site via a clean, dropdown menu. It has proven so popular that companies such as Acquia provide it by default to all their customers:

Here's how to install it:

Step 1: Click here to download the latest version of "Admin Menu". Choose the top link under "Recommended releases".
Step 2: Extract the files into a folder on your desktop. The folder will be called "admin_menu"
Step 3: Login to your site's files via FTP and navigate to /sites/default/. If there isn't a folder called /modules/ here, create one.
Step 4: Upload the "admin_menu" folder to /sites/default/modules/
Step 5: Go to Administer >> Modules >> Administration menu and check the box.
Step 6: Click 'Save Configuration" at the very bottom of the screen.
Step 7: Go to Administer >> Site configuration >> Administration menu and there are some settings you can edit.

Once you've followed those seven steps, your dropdown menu should appear at the top of the page.

Showing an RSS Feed in a Drupal Block

In this tutorial we'll show you how to place an RSS feed inside a block. You can then display that RSS feed anywhere around your theme. We don't need any extra modules this week as we'll be using the core Aggregator Module:

Setting up the Aggregator Module

First of all, we're going to set up the Aggregator module so that it can handle the RSS feeds for us.

Step 1: Go to Administer >> Site building >> Modules. Check the box next to "Aggregator" and click Save Configuration.
Step 2: Go to Administer >> click "By module" at the top.
Step 3: Find the "Aggregator" area right at the top and then click on "Feed aggregator":

Step 4: Click "Add Feed" along the top and enter the address of your RSS feed:

Step 5: Click "Save" and then "update items". That will load the latest articles from your RSS feed.

Placing the RSS Feed in a Block

Now that Aggregator is handling the RSS feeds for us, we'll go and place it into a block on our site:

Step 6: Go to Administer >> Site building >> Blocks. Scroll down to find the block with the same name as the feed your created in Step 4. Aggregator has automatically created this for you.
Step 7: More than likely, you will need to click "Configure" next to the block and choose a new title. Aggregator creates a default title of "[feed name] feed latest items".
Step 8: Publish the block and check to see how it looks on your site:

Adding a WYSIWYG Editor to Your Drupal Site

What is a WYSIWYG Editor and Why Do You Need It?

So your site users don't have to use code. Its as simple as that.

WYSIWYG stands for "What You See Is What You Get" ... if you select some text and click the "bold" button, that text will be bold. If you select some text and click the "italic" button, that text will be in italics. There's no messing around with HTML. That will be a relief to some of you and more particularly ... your clients and site visitors.

Installing the WYSIWYG Module

First of all, we're going to install a WYSIWYG module that will allow Drupal to install a range of different editors.

Step 1: Click here to download the latest version of "WYSIWYG". Choose the top link under "Recommended releases".
Step 2: Extract the files into a folder on your desktop. The folder will be called "wysiwyg"
Step 3: Login to your site's files via FTP and navigate to /sites/all/. If there isn't a folder called /modules/ here, create one.
Step 4: Upload the "wysiwyg" folder to /sites/all/modules/
Step 5: Go to Administer >> Site building >> Modules. Check the box next to "Wysiwyg" and click Save Configuration.
Step 6: Go to Administer >> Site configuration >> Wysiwyg and you should see a screen with several suggested editors. One option is TinyMCE and that is the example we will use:

Adding a WYSIWYG Editor to Your Drupal Site

Installing TinyMCE

Now we're going to install the TinyMCE editor itself:

Step 7: Click on the "Download" link or go directly to http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/download.php
Step 8: Download the latest TinyMCE to your desktop and extract the files. The folder will be called "tinymce 2". Rename this to simply "tinymce"
Step 9: Login to your site's files via FTP and navigate to /sites/all/. If there isn't a folder called /libraries/ here, create one.
Step 10: Upload the "wysiwyg" folder to /sites/all/libraries/
Step 11: Go back to Go to Administer >> Site configuration >> Wysiwyg and screen we saw before should now look like this:

Step 12: Save these settings and now when you go to edit an article, you should see a fully-fledged editor:

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