Drupal course hengl

Drupal in 3 hours
(php, MySQL, CSS)

Tomislav Hengl
ISRIC — World Soil Information, Wageningen University

Internal training, 16 May 2011, Wageningen

Programme

BLOCK 1 (45 mins): Introduction to Drupal (design, main
principles, basic and extended functionality, theming and
customization);
BLOCK 2 (30 mins): Technical issues behind Drupal —
php, MySQL, CSS;
BLOCK 3 (20 mins): Installing Drupal and ﬁrst steps;
BLOCK 4 (45 mins): Using Drupal to manage
international research groups and events
(geomorphometry.org);
BLOCK 5 (45 mins): Using drupal to collect and serve soil
data (soilproﬁles.org);


Disclaimer

This course focuses on using Drupal; you will NOT learn
how to script in php.

1
Download and install programs, follow exercises.

Disclaimer

The idea is to help you ﬁnd your way (documentation,
tutorials) and make ﬁrst steps.

1

Disclaimer

You can follow this training actively1 or passively.

1

Disclaimer

You can follow this training actively1 or passively.
This is NOT an R training course.

1

The open source movement

Open Source solutions2 :
Operating systems: Linux
Databases: SQL
Scientiﬁc writing: LTEX
A

Spatial analysis: GRASS GIS, SAGA GIS
Statistical computing: R
Content management: Drupal

2
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf

Drupal — basic facts

Drupal is a OS CMS written in PHP (created by Dries
Buytaert).
It is used as a back-end system for at least 1.5% of all
websites worldwide3 .
There is an active community of users and developers
(DrupalCon Events).
Probably more suited for Academic work than e.g.:
WordPress, WikiMedia and/or Plone;
Three major parts: (1) Content (MySQL database), (2)
Functionality (Modules), (3) Style (Themes).

3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal

Dries Buytaert


Google trends


US Government uses it!


Drupal structure

Content:
User-inserted textual content
Multimedia (ﬁles)
Website traﬃc (metadata)
Functionality:
Basic modules
User-contributed modules
Embedded (PHP) scripts
Style / layout:
Themes
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
Blocks


Audiences

Passive end-users (they do not even know that they use
Drupal!);
Active end-users (they need to know how to create content);
Website administrators (they need to know how to install,
customize, extend and fix functionality);
Developers (they need to know PHP and other programming
languages);
Support staff (they need to know how to fix problems);


PHP

PHP4 is a general-purpose language for web development
(scripts).
PHP script =⇒ Web server =⇒ HTML content
Installed on more than 20 million websites and 1 million web
servers.
PHP has hundreds of base functions and thousands more via
extensions.

4
‘Personal Home Page Tools’.

PHP example

<html>
<head>
< t i t l e>L a s t u p d a t e d PHP S c r i p t</ t i t l e>
</head>

<?
$ l a s t m o d i f i e d = f i l e m t i m e ( ”e x a m p l e 7 . php3 ” ) ;
p r i n t ( ”L a s t M o d i f i e d ” ) ;
p r i n t ( date ( ”m/ j / y h : i ” , $ l a s t m o d i f i e d ) ) ;
?>

</body>
</ html>


CSS examples

<html>
<head>
<s t y l e type=” t e x t / c s s ”>
body { background −image : u r l ( ' p a p e r . g i f ' ) ; }
</ s t y l e>
</head>

<body>
<h1>H e l l o World !</h1>
</body>

</ html>


Where to get help?

The big idea of FOSS is that you try to learn things yourself!
There are many open access Tutorials.
I often teach myself things by watching videos and slides.
You might buy some of the extensive Drupal books.
You might hire some web-programming guru that specializes
in Drupal (the creator?).


Teach-yourself


Drupal marketplace


Software

Google Chrome or Firefox web browser;
FileZilla ﬁle transfer to server;
WinEdt code editing;
R download content from a website;


Requirements

Disk space / RAM (FTP access);
Web server (Apache, MySQL);
PHP support;
Read/write access;


Video tutorial


Migration of content

There are several possibilities:
Migrate from a passive website to a CMS;
Migrate from a CMS to CMS5 ;
Migrate from a server to a server (backup_migrate);

5
E.g” http://drupal.org/node/43178
.:

Drupal modules


Set-up an ODBC driver


Specify connection


Connecting to Drupal MySQL DB
> library(RODBC)
> geomorph.conn <- odbcConnect(dsn="geomorphometry.org")
> odbcGetInfo(geomorph.conn)
DBMS_Name
"MySQL"
DBMS_Ver
"5.1.56-log"
Driver_ODBC_Ver
"03.51"
Data_Source_Name
"geomorphometry.org"
Driver_Name
"myodbc5.dll"
Driver_Ver
"05.01.0008"
ODBC_Ver
"03.80.0000"
Server_Name
"lin18.mojsite.com via TCP/IP"


Open Soil Proﬁles


Web forms


Final notes

Drupal is one of the fastest growing OS CMS.
It has an extensive society that have contributed over 8k
modules.
It is stable, reliable and secure (although there are some
smaller threats).
You can teach yourself Drupal (PHP). . . the issue is only how
much and what.


Literature (advanced)

Using Drupal by Angela Byron
Learning Drupal 6 Module Development by Matt Butcher.
Pro Drupal Development by John K. VanDyk and Matt
Westgate.


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