Overview of the Drupal8 Community documentation Drupal

Flexibility to meet simple

Content Management strives to balance flexibility and ease of solution. If the solution is too simple and can only be used for a single purpose if it is too flexible, it may be too difficult for the newcomer to learn.

A generic Content management system (CMS) is like a toy truck's specific assumptions about how it will be used, and these assumptions are hard to cover. Content Management framework, on the other hand, such as raw materials need to carry out any toys have made any assumptions about how they will be used, as well as the need for professional technical knowledge in order to get anything.

Drupal's design is a perfect content management solution for the simplicity and flexibility of non-technical users. It is built through its modular approach to Web sites. Unlike other cms,drupal that are not prefabricated toy trucks, but a collection of wheels, axles, windshields, frames, etc., a toy manufacturer can easily be connected together. Drupal, the manufacturer can create a toy truck, but he or she can easily create a toy plane, submarine, or robot. To this end, Drupal can be described as a content management system and content management framework of a unified system, and strive to have the advantages of both, without their own shortcomings.

So whether a website creator is creating a news site, an online store, a social network, a blog, a wiki, or something else, it just will be the right module. The only limitation is the creator's imagination.

Drupal in action

Clarify the differences between Drupal and other CMS, take the news website as an example. You want to be able to post news on the website, and you want to have a webpage with the latest five. Next, you decide to add a blog and put the link list on the home page of the last five blogs as well.

If you use a regular CMS, first you need to install a plugin that handles news and can put your own homepage on. Next, you'll need to install a plugin that keeps track of the latest blog posts and lists them on the homepage. Each plugin will only be responsible for tracking and managing a specific content, and each will remain relatively isolated from others.

But when you have a glorious night, what will happen to the idea of merging these two functional lists to show the latest news blogs, by contributing activities? If you are using a "toy car" CMS system, you may be unlucky. Or, you might need to hire a developer to write a custom plugin from scratch. But by using the power of Drupal to manage the abstract way, you can accomplish this task quickly and easily. Because Drupal's modules are made in a standard way and interface with a common base system, building a variety of ingenious, customized features is precisely the integration of components. In this example, you can use comments.

Of course, this flexibility is at a certain cost. When a toy truck can be immediately understood and ready to use without much thought, a modular vehicle structure toolkit will naturally require you to read the instruction manual first. Bricks are available, but you need to learn how to combine them to put a paper prototype and turn it into a fully functional website.

Drupal core, and thousands of expansion modules to build it, need an initial investment learning while mastering Drupal's way is very beneficial to the enthusiastic community is a Drupal site builder freed from the simple, flexible dilemma. Once you've tried Drupal, you may have to collect dust from your toy truck and boat in the closet.

How is Drupal?

Are you interested? Let's take a closer look at how Drupal works.

People usually think of a site that collects static pages, and perhaps some features such as blogs or news engines are thrown out in circles. When they go to manage their own sites, they want to be in a tree-like hierarchy of pages that they will edit.

However, the same concept changes for most Drupal content types: A node (about this). static web pages, blogs and news (some possible node types) are stored in the same way, and the site's navigation structure is designed through the Edit menu, view (Table of Contents), and block (end content often has different site links).

Just like separating the standard page code XHTML find the information you provide meaningful structure, while the CSS arranges the presentation. The Drupal node maintains structured information about blogs (such as title, content, author, date) or message (title, content, online date, note date), while the menu system, as well as classification (content tagging) and views, create an information schema. Finally, the theme system, as well as the Display module board, how to control all this seems to site visitors.

Since these layers are separate, you can provide a completely different content navigation with different users to present according to their specific needs and roles. Pages can be combined differently, in different order of precedence, and various features and content can be displayed or hidden as needed.

Node: The secret of Drupal's flexibility

We don't talk about "nodes" every day, but because it's at the heart of Drupal design, they deserve further research. Essentially, a node is a set of related bits of information. When you create a new blog, you are not only defining its body, but also its title, content, author links, creation date, classification (tags), and so on, these elements will be displayed when the topic Layer node is displayed. Other metadata, when the node is controlled, is displayed at all-such as classification or publishing status.

Before recommending, you are not limited to presenting the content of your site in a single way. You can define multiple navigation schemes, customize themes, or design websites. You can take a look at some of the contributing topics Https://www.drupal.org/project/themes

The comment also explains Drupal. Comments are often considered as part of a blogging system, but there is no single "blogging system" in Drupal. Drupal simply operates nodes in the way that most people think of as a blog feature. But comments can be enabled on any Content type (or node) you choose to be blog, news, book (provide basic wiki functionality) or any other type you can create. Drupal's modular system is limited to the imagination of the builders of this website.

As the core of the Synergy

Create an information site from "one-to-many" is the majority of CMS do out-of-the-box broadcasts. Drupal shines, however, by allowing site users to create content and interactions-from "one-to-many" to "many-to-many".

With some CMS systems, you can build a blog where you can install plugins to process a user community. But when you want to give a personal blog to each of your users, to sort out their content, they can show it alone with their skins, and also produce cross-topic summaries of blogs, top five lists, and links to well-customized user profiles? If you still want to put these blogs and forums, wiki-like environment, and user-owned photo galleries? The information of a typical CMS makes such a scenario difficult to implement. In contrast, Drupal's approach makes this situation not only easy to build, but also easy over time.

Drupal is designed to get up from the ground, so site creators can entrust content creation, even site management, to users. All the Web site creators need to do is define what users can do, and then everyone starts working together.

Get started quickly and customize a wide range of

The flexibility of Drupal is incredible, but it is very easy to install it. A simple FTP upload and short configuration, you can connect with your database and start your first Drupal site and run within one hours.

Select a contained topic and start adding content. Do you want visitors to log in? Then you should switch on or off authentication ". Do you want to open some of your own tools? Then you should open the "forum" to make comments on the node type, open the Wiki collaboration book module, create forums and polls, and use the structured, hierarchical, or free-form labels for the content of the site.

Do you want your skin to be applied to the website? Drupal's theme system uses small snippets of PHP that can be inserted into your design with dynamic content replacement placeholder Lorem itself in place. The markup generated by Drupal is clean and conforms to standard XHTML. There are no old school tables. There's no such thing. No kidding.

Drupal's Stream

If you want to go deeper into Drupal, you should understand the flow between the system layers. There are five main layers to consider:

1. The basis of this system is node data pool collection. Before anything can be displayed on the website, it must enter data.
2. The next layer is where the "module" is located. The modules are Drupal core part of the feature plug-in (their ship with Drupal) or their contributions have been created by the Drupal community members of the project. The module builds on Drupal's core functionality, allowing you to customize the data items (fields) in your node type, establish e-commerce, programmatically sort and display content (custom output filters you define control), and. The contribution of the Drupal module library in the rapidly growing thousands of different choices. They say people from individuals to large-scale companies work together to innovate.
3. On the next level, we find modules and menus. Blocks often provide the output of a module that can also be used to display what you need and then be placed in the layout of each part (theme) of the template. Blocks can be configured to output in different ways, or they can be displayed on a specific page, or only for a specific user. Menu Navigator, in Drupal, defines the content in each defined menu path (relative URL). The menu is Drupal provides all the page creation links in the Drupal core elements.
4. The second is user rights. This is set to be configured to determine what different kinds of users are allowed to do and see. The definitions of the various role permissions, in turn, users are assigned to these roles in order to give them the permissions defined.
5. On the top floor is the website theme ("Skin"). This is made up of XHTML and CSS, some PHP variables are mixed, so drupal generated content can be in the right place. Also included with each topic is a set of features that can be used to replace the standard functional modules, providing complete control over how the module generates the markup at the time of the output. Templates can also be dynamically assigned based on user permissions.

This directional traffic controls how Drupal works from the bottom to the top. Are some of the new features you want not appearing? Perhaps you uploaded the module into the system, but did not activate it, so the words are not functional (such as "one" in the above figure).

Maybe the module is installed and activated, but you still don't know what you want on your site. Did you forget to put the block, like "B"? Or does your user rights settings conflict with what you want, and your users do not take output as "C"?

Furthermore, it is necessary to understand the details of the output of the XHTML module as described above to get granular control. You are using a module, not exactly what you want, only the mark you want is a little different? Maybe you want to use a different tag, or do you want to specify something for a CSS class? You copy the output function module and push it up in the function of your theme file. Modify the code, and when the system is output, it will see you customize the functionality and use instead.

Got close and personal

Now that you have a brief introduction to Drupal, why not install on your server or online (simplytest. me) Try it? This installation and configuration guide gives step-by-step instructions if you need help to get started.

Welcome to the Drupal user community, happy website building!

Overview of the Drupal8 Community documentation Drupal