I am interested in creating Top 10 lists for Drupal. These lists will feature advice from the user community about working with Drupal. The lists will serve as a fun learning tool for those working with Drupal.
The lists will be divided into 3 categories: Beginner, Intermediate, Expert.
The lists will evolve over time and may eventually include more than 10 items each, but I thought it would be fun to go with the "Top 10" idea initially.
An example of an item that might appear in the Beginner Top 10 is: "Never, ever edit Drupal's core code." With an explanation as to why doing so is bad practice.
Perhaps you had an "Aha!" moment with Drupal in the past. Whatever you learned at that moment would be a good candidate for the Top 10 list. Maybe at some point along your Drupal adventure you thought "I wish someone had told me that earlier!" That would be a good candidate for the Top 10 list.
Once I have 30 items (10 for each list) I'll post them online and provide a print out that can be distributed at SandCamp2011.
So take a moment to help out other Drupal users and submit a Top 10 item for either Beginner, Intermediate, or Advance Drupal users.
This will be fun and interesting!
Comments
Never use "Filtered HTML" editor settings
Why? Because pictures and video won't show up, and you'll tear out your hair for 2 days wondering why something so simple isn't working!
... that's my first AHA contribution :D
Strongly disagree
You have a point, and I'll get to that later.
But first let's adjust the recommendation to "always use Filtered HTML, always". Filtered HTML is one of the top reasons why Drupal is such a safe system (along with a crack security team, good coding standards, and lots of eye balls due to its open source nature). Imagine for a second what happens if you allow all your content creators to insert any old markup. Not only is your site now as insecure as can be (short of allowing PHP), but your theme design goes to hell and future redesigns are virtually impossible, and your editors will bug you to adjust headers and sidebars to "their" page layout. Goodbye CMS!
I do agree with techygenius that the Drupal filters are a major stumbling block for new users, so let's rephrase his point to:
As soon as you have a vague idea of your site's architecture and content types, visit the input filters admin section and configure Filtered HTML. On Drupal 6 you typically find this page at admin/settings/filters/1/configure. Add to the Allowed HTML tags what you anticipate you'll need. Don't go overboard, stick to the bare minimum, you can add more allowed tags later.
Then give your regular users Filtered HTML permissions only, and leave Full HTML to administrators exclusively.
--
Christoph Weber
Strongly disagree
You make excellent points Christoph. Perhaps the original comment could be refined even more to include "Never use Filtered HTML during development..." Once a site is launched, do as you propose by allowing only minimal html.
San Diego Area Drupal Services
http://www.catwired.com
Filtered HTML
That's a great suggestion for the top 10 techy. I hit on that issue myself during my drupal learning curve.
I think is a good item for the "Beginners" Top 10 though it could really be in any of the 3 categories.
Keep the suggestions coming!
San Diego Area Drupal Services
http://www.catwired.com
Beginner Tip: enable permissions for anonymous users
Everything may look and work great after you install a new module, but then anonymous users start complaining about seeing nothing of what you are describing that 'should' be up on the site. Usually that anonymous user is your client, during a review.
Don't forget to enable permissions for that new module for anonymous users.
Rich Yumul
Sage Tree Solutions
www.sagetree.net
Beginner Tip: enable permissions
Another great Beginner Tip Rich. Those permissions can really trip you up!
San Diego Area Drupal Services
http://www.catwired.com
Intermediate Tip: Looks like Crap in IE
Have you ever worked on a site, and it looks terrific in Firefox, Safari and Chrome, but absolutely looks like crap in Internet Explorer? I mean, it looks even worse than usual, by a magnitude - like it's not even reading the CSS files?
Chances are, IE isn't reading your css files. There's a weird bug with IE where it doesn't like it if your web pages reference more than 30 css files.
3 Options:
1) http://drupal.org/project/ie_css_optimizer
2) http://drupal.org/project/unlimited_css
3) Turn on css optimization in the Admin > Site Configuration > Performance settings. This isn't really practical for theme dev, when you're tweaking css files, but if you're not, this works in a snap.
HTH
Rich Yumul
Sage Tree Solutions
www.sagetree.net
Intermediate Tip: Looks like Crap in IE
Good tip Rich. But I am curious...what would cause Drupal to have more than 30 css files? I'm assuming 30 or more css files is an unusual circumstance. Correct? If so, what circumstance(s) would result in so many css files?
San Diego Area Drupal Services
http://www.catwired.com
31 stylesheet limit
Actually this is fairly common. I'm looking at a relatively simple site of mine: core brings in 5 stylesheets, 4 from Ubercart, 3 from Date module, 2 from CCK, one each from a number of other modules, and the Zen theme alone has 15! If you're not aggregating CSS or using one of the modules rich.yumul suggests, you can hit this limit pretty quickly. (And in Zen's defense, it now includes this functionality - but when I built my first Drupal site on Zen 1.0 I hit the 31-stylesheet limit and it was a big WTF!)
31 stylesheet limit
Thanks Bright. Given your comment "...it was a big WTF!" This suggestion by Rich obviously needs to be included in a Top 10 list!
San Diego Area Drupal Services
http://www.catwired.com
Beginner/Intermediate: Giving PHP permissions
whenever you see php in a permission think long and hard about granting that permission to a user. giving someone any kind of php permission(s) could wreak havoc on your site. save any php permissions(s) for highly trusted people
San Diego Drupal Service Providers
http://www.sandiego-drupal.com
Beginner/Intermediate: Giving PHP permissions
whenever you see php in a permission think long and hard about granting that permission to a user. giving someone any kind of php permission(s) could wreak havoc on your site. save any php permissions(s) for highly trusted people
San Diego Drupal Service Providers
http://www.sandiego-drupal.com
Admin pages are blank or "Requested page could not be found"
If the admin/build/modules/list page is blank or says "Requested page could not be found," this is most likely a memory issue. To be sure, check the web server error logs and look for a line similar to this:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 418591 bytes) in /path/to/drupal/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 29There are two fixes:
memory_limit = 16M- if you have permissions, add this line to your php.ini file in your system. If you do not have permission, add a php.ini file in your drupal root with this line.ini_set('memory_limit', '16M');- add this line to your sites/default/settings.php. This may not work with all servers.php_value memory_limit 16M- add this line to your .htaccess file in your drupal root (this only works if PHP is running as an Apache module).But don't just increase the memory limit to the max. Less is more. The less memory you allocate for PHP, the faster the site and more visitors your site can have at one time.
HTH!
John Bocalig
Sage Tree Solutions
www.sagetree.net