Instructional D3

How do you make the default installation of Drupal into what you want? How do you know which modules you will need? How do you organize your content? How do you get your content into your site?

This article considers the insert view module as a means of adding a view to a page. With this method, you don't need a unique content type, you just need to enable the insert_view filter. This is probably the easiest way to insert a view into your page.

In this short article, I am going to look at using the view reference module as a means of adding a view to a page. With this method, you can create a content type that has an option to display content from a view. You can use a view as is or pass it an argument. The sections below present a sample scenario, steps for implementing view reference, and a layout tip.

In this short article, I am going to share with you what Jess Snyder is doing with her sites by using the CCK computed field module. With this method, you can create a content type that is designed to display content from a view after the node has passed an argument to the view.

Sometimes instruction is more than how-to steps in a video- or print-based tutorial. There are a lot of Drupal tutorials available and the best ones offer more than the steps you should follow in order to accomplish a task in Drupal. They sprinkle in foundational facts, concepts, principles, and/or rules about the procedure to accommodate different learner skill levels and to help make the tutorial more memorable, more understandable. I can't tell you that the developers of these successful tutorials know they are doing this (for all I know they are natural instructors), but if you want some ideas on how to make your tutorials (video or print) a little better, I offer you this resource on instructional design content structures. Each structure can play a role in the learning process.

When I upgraded from D4.6 to D6.10, I noticed that secondary menus weren't showing up. I assumed I had just forgotten to turn something on so I didn't worry about it. Upon upgrading another installation from D4.6 to D6.11, I realized that secondary menus weren’t showing on the second upgrade either. This meant I needed to investigate further. To make a long story short, the variable table had the wrong value for menu_secondary_links_source. To know what this means and how I came to this conclusion, please read the process below.

The video below is a YouTube video and is embedded using the Video_filter module. This approach saves you from having to use the PHP provided by YouTube and thus having to enable the PHP input format for the node. For some sites, this is not a big deal but for sites whose users are not web savvy, allowing the users to enter PHP could put your site at risk if the code has errors. To install and use the video filter, follow the steps below.

If you haven't discovered the Flickr module yet, check it out. With a simple filter, you can add images to your site from Flickr. They were taken at the Drupal Doc Planning Sprint in Toronto, March 2009. The image to the right is set to a size of small. If you want to align the image (like you see here), wrap the image in paragraph tag and include style="float:right" as a paragraph attribute.