It has been a productive since the last update. Learned a lot and can visualize how utilize what has been learned so far in real-life situations. Based on what I have learned so far I have to say Drupal is very flexible system. It reminds me of SAP's business solutions. Highly customizable.
What exactly was accomplished?
- Gone thru chapters 5 to 7 of "Drupal 7" by David Mercer
- Basic Content
- Advanced Content
- Multimedia
- Installed / activated the following modules:
- Aggregator
- Book
- File
- Forum
- Image
- PHP filter
- Poll
- Chaos Tool Suite
- Wysiwyg with CKEditor (like — wish images can be uploaded instead of URLs)
- Views
- Learned how to create:
- Content Types
- Feed Aggregators
- Forums
- Image Styles
- Menus
- System Actions (e-mail notifications)
- Taxonomy Vocabularies
- Text Formats
- Triggers
- Users, Roles, and Permissions
- Configured some system settings:
- Account Settings
- File System
- Performance Settings
- RSS Publishing
- Site Information
- Created contents based on the following Content Types:
- Basic Page
- Blog
- Book (thumbs up)
- Custom Content Type
- Forum
- Poll
- Feed Aggregator (very cool and you can categorize each article)
Issues
Didn't run into too many issues. The biggest one was the installation instruction for CKEditor was not very clear. It looks like it is not necessary to install the CKEditor module. The Wysiwyg module only needed the CKEditor library.
The other issue is very minor. It has to do with the fact that I'm running a localhost web server off a Mac OS X (10.6) laptop which FTP is not enabled. Due to time contraint and there is a simple work around (simply unzip and copy the files/folders) I didn't try to figure out how to enable FTP so Drupal can use it to install modules, get updates, etc.
What's Next?
Can't wait to learn about Views and Theming (chapters 8 and 9 David Mercer's Drupal 7 book). Plus, I would really like to see how to show lower level menu items to show as drop-down menu off the main navigation tab (or some ways to show second level menu items).
