Category: Drupal

Drupal: set up a draggable card sort view – Part 1

Posted on August 8, 2009 by ellen

Drag and drop your items into order

Drupal’s Draggable Views module makes it possible to create tables with Ajax-style drag and drop rows. Each row has a “handle” that makes it possible to drag it up or down to change the order of the items in the table. Draggable views are perfect for making “To-do” lists, outlines, and any kind of list where you need to constantly reorder individual items. I recently used it to build a draggable “card sort” view for research cards. This enables a researcher to enter cards in no particular order, then organize them when it comes time to write up the research. It would work just as well for organizing a novel or script.

The problem with the Views module is that there is sort of an irreducible complexity to designing a view, and it can be quite difficult at first to figure out all the steps involved in getting the outcome you want. There are so many options and settings and a few minor usability issues which make it all quite confusing at first. This tutorial will give you an introduction to the concepts and walk you through building an idea organizer using draggable tables.

Here’s a closeup of a Draggable table. Each row has a cross-shaped “handle” that enables you to drag the entire row up and down the table at will.

Drupal: Use Taxonomy Access Control Lite to protect content areas for each course

Posted on July 26, 2009 by ellen

Drupal is often used in education these days, and a common requirement for course sites is to create protected areas for each course. You could simply have a separate Drupal site for each course, but sometimes that is not an option, or not efficient, particularly if you want to have some common areas, and other areas which are restricted by course.

There are many approaches you could take to do this using various Drupal modules, but one relatively simple method is to use the Taxonomy Access Control Lite module. This tutorial will help you get started with managing rights in Drupal course sites. In a later tutorial, I’ll cover forums, wikis and and blogs.

Drupal not recognizing update

Posted on March 4, 2009 by ellen

As if the current crop of virus warnings and financial data-stealing Trojans weren’t enough, mandatory security updates just came out for both Movable Type and Drupal. The Movable Type upgrade went without incident but Drupal

Drupal: cannot redeclare date_api_views_data() error after installing Views 2.3

Posted on February 18, 2009 by ellen

I had a lot of trouble trying to update the Views module. When I would attempt to run update.php, I got the White Screen of Death. I removed several modules and tried to view the

Drupal module ImagePicker does not show up in Page edit screen

Posted on January 18, 2009 by ellen

After installing ImagePicker 6.x-1.2 in a new Drupal site, I opened a book page to try to add images to it. There was no ImagePicker Fieldset below the text entry area. It did show up

Drupal: Take back control of a folder from Drupal and password protecting it

Posted on January 9, 2009 by ellen

By default, Drupal takes control of all subdirectories within its root folder. If Drupal resides within the web root of your site, you will not be able to get to any subdirectories that are non-Drupal related. Drupal will give a “Page Not Found” error on any page that doesn’t have Drupal content associated with it.

Getting the WYSIWYG module to work in Drupal 6

Posted on August 13, 2008 by ellen

I had a lot of trouble getting TinyMCE text editor to work consistently in Drupal 5.9, so when I installed Drupal 6 and was scanning through the available modules, I was very glad to see that the WYSIWYG editor module could function as a replacement.

Although the easy-to-use WYSIWYG editor is popular with our site’s users, sometimes I find it gets in the way, and want to turn it off.

Drupal multisite – symlinking, a key step

Posted on July 31, 2008 by ellen

Setting up a multisite system is very easy with Drupal and is well documented both in the settings.php file and in the multi-site section of the handbook on Drupal.org. However there is one step that is usually left out of the instructions or mentioned only in passing, and it requires SSH access. You must create a symlink from the folders your multi-sites will be accessed at to the actual folder that the Drupal core files reside in.

So if you will have several sites like:

http://yoursite.com/site1 (the core files are located here)
and you want a second and third site to be accessed at

http://yoursite.com/site2
and
http://yoursite.com/site3

then you must create symlinks from site2 and site3 that point to site1.

Drupal admin: Changing the default Open or Collapsed state of filters and fieldsets in Node editing screens

Posted on May 11, 2008 by ellen

As you add modules to Drupal, the “Edit” screen of each node can start piling up a lot of optional filters and settings that you can apply to the node. These include comment settings, input filters, image pickers and browsers, authoring settings, etc. The general term for all these added features on the node edit screen is “fieldsets.”

Most of them are collapsed when you first open the screen, which makes it easy to scroll down to the “submit” button or the lower fieldsets. However some modules set themselves to be open by default. This can be a problem if you have to edit a lot of nodes – it causes a lot of extra scrolling and is visually confusing.

Error: user warning: Duplicate entry “n” for key 1…

Posted on April 27, 2008 by ellen

After doing a user import via csv into a new Drupal site, some new users could no longer register. When I attempted to create the users manually, I got this error: user error: Duplicate entry