Drupal Links

net2Community, Inc. is a proud sponsor and founder of The Chicago West - Fox Valley Drupal Users Group

Anyone interested in learning more about developing or managing their Drupal websites is welcome to participate!  Visit the link above to find out more about our meet-up group and events.

Drupal Selected Reading

I thought it might be a good idea to start a collection of links to selected reading content about Drupal.  I get a lot of questions from people about how to start working with drupal.  Unfortunately lots of good information is out there already, but it's in "snippet" form in comments, forum posts or short stories.  I'm looking to find well written and more complete resources.

http://www.poplarware.com/drupalcheatsheet.html - The Drupal Cheat Sheet by Jennifer Hodgdon is a great example, thanks to her for this.  It will save me lots of time explaining things and provides a great primer to people just starting with Drupal.

http://mogdesign.eu/blog/ultimate-drupal-tutorial-collection/ is another great example of the various tutorials and learning resources available for Drupal.

More Drupal Links

If you are interested in learning more about the Drupal Content Management System here are some links for you to check out.

• http://drupal.org The official Drupal Community Website
• http://groups.drupal.org The official Drupal Groups Website for various projects and interest areas
• http://themegarden.org A great site to see various themes available for Drupal
• http://www.drupalsites.net/ Example Drupal Sites
• http://www.cdmug.org The Chicago Drupal Meetup Group
• http://drupalmodules.com/A site to assist in selecting Drupal Modules
• http://drupal.org/planet A huge aggregated feed from the Drupal Community
• http://association.drupal.org/ The Drupal Association was established to help the Drupal community with fun­ding, infra­structure, events, promotion and distribution.
• Hot Drupal Web Hosting My best recommendation for an independent Drupal Web host

Bob's Favorite Contributed Modules

for administration...

• http://drupal.org/project/admin_menu and http://drupal.org/project/admin_menu_dropdown - easier to use than the Drupal Administration Menu
• http://drupal.org/project/adminrole - allows you to assign a role which will be given all permissions for all active modules/components.
• http://drupal.org/project/backup_migrate - you have to have backup, this is a good pick.
• http://drupal.org/project/dba - provides DBA functions for MySQL within Drupal.
• http://drupal.org/project/sitedoc - provides documentation for your site.
• http://drupal.org/project/sitenotes - provides facilities to communicate on site tasks and notes. (careful it can conflict with other modules i.e. OG)
• http://drupal.org/project/mollom - A cool new way to keep site spam under control, we use it on this site.
• http://drupal.org/project/menu_per_role - easy way to provide specific menus based on user roles.
• http://drupal.org/project/update_status - provides connection back to drupal.org for module updates, including security updates. This module is included as part of Drupal Core 6.x
• http://drupal.org/project/upgrade_status - helps assess the availability and status of site modules for the next version of drupal.  Am I ready for v6.x?

for SEO...

• http://drupal.org/project/google_analytics - put your google code in and track for every page.
• http://drupal.org/project/pathauto - provides a user readable name for content pages.
• http://drupal.org/project/xmlsitemap - creates a sitemap based on sitemaps.org, compatable with google, yahoo, ask, and windows live.

others...

• http://drupal.org/project/cck - the all important Content Construction Kit
• http://drupal.org/project/views - Views for your content
• http://drupal.org/project/panels - Getting ready to deploy into a production site, loving the flexibility!
• http://drupal.org/project/comment_notify - notifies users of comments to posts
• http://drupal.org/project/invite - a must for any community site, invite other people.
• http://drupal.org/project/nodeprofile - makes a user profile into a node so you can extend the information on your users.
• http://drupal.org/project/extlink - a nice icon to show an external link
• http://drupal.org/project/fckeditor - some people like TinyMCE, I like this editor better.
• http://drupal.org/project/fivestar - used on foxvalleycp.com you get to vote on posts and comments, give it a try. (Part of the new Acquia distribution along wth many others.)
• http://drupal.org/project/mass_contact - What good is a community site without the ability to send mass emails to users?
• http://drupal.org/project/simplenews - a good tool to provide for simple newletters.
• http://drupal.org/project/userlink - users can submit links... that's what Favorite Links is all about on our menu.

Don't take it from me... check out the download stats at Drupal.org http://drupal.org/project/usage