Drupal Resources

Posted by kpdirection@dru... on July 28, 2009 at 6:08pm

Has anybody got any good resources for Drupal squirrelled away in their favorites folder?

I find that whenever I search for a Drupal topic, I see 4million websites out there with the Drupal API reference - well done, guys. We only need one, and it's at Drupal.org. All they've done is clutter up the results, so actually finding examples of how to use the more obscure regions of Drupal is very tricky. Searching Drupal itself is rarely helpful, as their website is so disorganised; I'm sure I saw an example of something once, but it disappeared before I had a chance to bookmark it!

I find two websites that give good information (for me, at least);

http://www.lullabot.com
http://thedrupalblog.com

There must be more out there somewhere, surely!

I do have the standard books; Pro Drupal Development by VanDyk (I remember when I opened it for the first time and said to my wife "I don't even understand the introduction!". Now it's never off my desk. I also have Drupal 6 Themes by Shreves. There's some useful info in the book, but the books index is so woefully inadequate that I hardly ever refer to it.

Regards,

Pete

Comments

What types of things are you

Posted by amariotti on July 28, 2009 at 6:30pm

What types of things are you searching for? Give us an example. Whenever I look for anything I am usually able to find things using Google. Drupal.org search is OK, but most of the time is sub-par at finding what I need.

The two sites you listed above are really good. Drupal Planet is a nice resource as well. The http://api.drupal.org site is great for coders that want to build things into Drupal. I can't say that I'm quite to the "coder" level yet, but I do know that it's a good resource. There are a few others, but I generally stick to Google and try to be as specific as I can.

Andrew (amariotti)

An example...

Posted by kpdirection@dru... on July 29, 2009 at 4:16am

A good example would be RSS feeds.

A project I'm working on has several microsites within a main website, and each microsite has between one and three RSS feeds in it. The SQL statements producing the records required were very complex, and Views just wasn't up to the job, so I needed to generate the feeds manually.

I had a few clues from the geeksandgod.com website, which led me to Node_feed. Googling that got me to drupalcoder, where I found the bones of a solution - to use hook_menu. The solution on that site didn't work for me, as again my SQL statement was too complex for the function used (db_rewrite_sql). My SQL statement already handled the node access issues, however, so I was happy to omit db_rewrite_sql. A few more changes (making the database return an array of nids, for example), gave me the results I needed - a generic RSS feed module that I could pass parameters into.

I'm now at the point where my RSS feeds are all there, but I want to template the output to lose some standard fields (pubdate being the main one) and replace them with CCK fields from the associated node. And I can't find any clues!

My main point is that I can't believe I'm the first person to do this stuff, so where are the resources online to help? I know that a lot of it is knowing the correct terminology and knowing what question to ask, but even so...

Regards,

Pete.

Peter Connolly
Technical Director
KP Direction LLC
www.kpdirection.com

http://learnbythedrop.com/

Posted by Jordash on July 29, 2009 at 5:38am

http://learnbythedrop.com/ was pretty helpful to me, I agree though, The Drupal site and the main Drupal Forums are most unhelpful

IRC

Posted by j3sika on July 29, 2009 at 6:41pm

Check out the #drupal-support and the #drupal IRC channels. I find them very helpful, plus most of the time people are on them all day while they work.. bet someone else has created a query close to what you need, or can refer you to someone that has. ;)

Jess

Jess

Thanks, but

Posted by kpdirection@dru... on July 30, 2009 at 3:17am

Thanks Jess,

Unfortunately IRC is switched off on our network. If it becomes a big issue, and I can't get help elsewhere, I'll try to get it switched on, but for the moment I'm too busy to play with the firewalls and DNS stuff we have...

Pete

Peter Connolly
Technical Director
KP Direction LLC
www.kpdirection.com