What is good drupal

I continue my series of amazing articles on Drupal. Delightful, not because the articles are amazing, but because I admire the Drupal in them.

In " Intuitive refinement ... joyful emotions of a beginner ... " there was a small background of my acquaintance with Drupal. And now I want to tell a couple of common bright moments that I really remember and liked. I will try to turn dry definitions into colorful, tangible examples.

Drupal is CMS and CMF.

')
CMS is a content management system. And CMF is a CMS creation toolkit. Drupal is both. But for me more than the second.

As it manifested to me ... Having experience with Joomla 1.5 and 1.10 for some reason I never wondered what was inside there. Or, for example, even how some simple module works. Everything was meticulously searched and installed exclusively out of the box, like a housewife without a technical education. Yes, it may not have matured, but there is also a subjective factor. But the first (forced) acquaintance with Drupal simply sucked me into the world of web development with my ears. Let me get away from the pros ...

Imagine that you are far from mechanics, but drive a car. Every time you are repaired by some uncles who are talking somewhere in a dark garage, where you do not have access, in an incomprehensible language: “modules, plugins, mambots, components”. From this you experience a complex that you come into contact with what you have no idea about. And break somewhere in the middle of the road - oh, how scary something! For some reason, Joomla remembered this for me (no offense to her fans, I admit that I am a layman in it and do not dare to speak for her at all).

And Drupal, when compared with the car, like a car with a glass hood and transparent parts. Willy-nilly, every day you see how something works there. Oil is running through one hose, gasoline, pistons, gears, generator — all in the palm of one hand. You do not want - do not poke your nose, do not wring hands - nobody forces you. But already the fear of the unknown has evaporated. You know that there are not dirty gnomes working in the “shaitan machine”, but ordinary mechanisms. And then you still can not stand it, you open the hood and climb back deeper, unable to tear yourself away ...

A vivid example of this for me is the Views module. When I began to customize the output of some materials, I saw at the bottom of the SQL query, generated automatically. University lessons and work while being a 1c programmer has come to mind. After a bit, I started logging into the database via php myadmin, looking at the labels and writing my requests. It turned out to be easier for me than using Views and I understood that now I can create such information output blocks on the site that I had only dreamed of before. It becomes doubly more interesting when you get acquainted with jquery and you start to connect gray tables with different effects, like animation. Effective and effective. Many more examples can be specified, probably. But CCK in the next paragraph, I think, will be enough.

Versatility

In the 6th drupale it was not possible to install CCK - the content designer. And in the 7th to face him, because he is already in the core. This is just a revolution of consciousness of some kind.

It turns out Node (publication) - it may not be just a post, with some standard for scribbling set: "announcement, image, full text, list of tags." Node can be anything in any incarnation. It can be a product with a list of technical specifications that you predetermine in the constructor in advance, it can be a military chronicle episode, where you specify the geographical coordinates and the number of dead, which are then automatically displayed on the Google map, etc. In general, in your site on Drupal, you can not just keep a blog from posts-posts, but create a detailed structure of a complex display of reality, creating your “types of publications” and including all your imagination in them ... (I confess, until your hands reached But a consciousness upheaval has already occurred. And the merit of this, I think, is drupal).

In this regard, Drupal reminded me of 1C with numerous industry configurations. Accounting, Salary and Personnel, Pharmacy, Driving, Dining, etc. In one configuration, a document is a real document about the transfer of money to millions of rubles-dollars, and in the other, a recipe for cooking mashed potatoes: how much salt to add and how many eggs to add. In general, Drupal broadened my mind, making it clear that Node is much more than just a “post” in blogger jargon ...

Flexibility

I do not know how Joomla 1.6, but 1.5 I drank quite a bit of blood with the setting of the output of dissimilar materials (again, I confess, yes, maybe I was stupid, and not Joomla is to blame).

I once wrote a flash Arabic language course consisting of flash files across the entire width of the screen. And the challenge was to disable the side panels for this section. I had to go through all the modules, and instead of "show everywhere" put "display only ..." and put in the manual menu items where you want to display. It seems normal, that is necessary. But when I now create a new section, you always have to go through all the modules (different menus, banners, google adsenses, etc.) and indicate for each that it should be displayed for the new section. Otherwise, the new section will generally go out naked, only with the header of the site ... In all appearances there is no simple, intuitive solution to this problem. But in Drupal for each block in the settings, you can choose from two options "display only there ..." and "display, except as there ..." and at the same time specify pages or sections - and not manually, but with the support of similarity reg.expressions. In my case, I would indicate not to display on links with a typical course link. And the rest of the site would work as usual.

Or, somehow I started to get involved in panoramic shots, when I finally had a camera, last fall. And also the problem arose that, due to their breadth, they do not fit into the general appearance of the pages (and if you make narrow ones, they look miserable). As an admin, I can conjure up and post them as I feel comfortable. And how can simple users be? So, it is very easy in Drupal through CCK, or even without it, to create a new type of material “Panorama” with the required fields. And create a template for it without displaying any extra fields, like the left, right sidebar. And now the user will press a special button “add panorama” in the menu (if he suddenly jumps in), enter a link to a well-known some kind of panhosting, and do not bathe that his masterpiece payzahs will use any side menu of the site or that his post rip site design 2000px wide ...

As for the drupal patterns, they seemed very simple to me, compared to the Djumlov ones. Intuitive, almost like normal html, where you can easily and clearly arrange your information without breaking your head over decoding CSS mazes (with which I painfully fought in Jumla).

Big temptation

I think, in spite of all the advantages, you should not flatter too much. Once I began to praise the drupal to my fellow student, a professional web developer, he laughed at me a little and said: “Do not throw such absolute judgments that they say they are the coolest and that's all. Yuzay yourself slowly. "

Here, for those who want to “use it little by little”, I think Drupal is an ideal option. If there are arguments - convince.