New Drupal 6 Third-Party Modules
One of the greatest things about Drupal is that the community contributions can promote and increase the diversity and features of any given project because they lower the development burden for website builders like you and me. This is an exceptionally valuable property of most, if not all, open-source projects.
What this means is that we can take a leisurely scroll over a variety of modules that have been made by someone, improved on by someone else, or changed into something else, and pick and choose the best. The converse of this is, of course, that any of your own developments can be made available to everyone else to use.
There are certain issues associated with using contributed modules such as the one we are going to incorporate into the demo site here. It is important to understand that people are providing useful software without enforcing payment. Please take it upon yourself to drop the developers a line every now and then to thank them for any functionality they have spent time and effort on.
Downloading Modules
The Drupal website houses a list of contributions that are available to add under the Modules tab of the Downloads page (http://drupal.org/project/modules). At the top of the Modules page there is a selection of Drupal versions from which you can choose the appropriate one, and then browse the modules by category, name or date, as shown in the following screenshot:
Obtaining the correct version is very important because a module developed for the 5.x family will almost certainly not work with the latest 6.x family. Unfortunately, the upgrading of contributions is not necessarily done at the same time as the core development; so it may be that there are some modules only built for older versions of Drupal—hopefully by the time you read this, most modules, if not all, will have been made compatible with 6.x.
For the purpose of demonstration, we will obtain a copy of a contribution that will save any site administrator a lot of time. The DHTML Menu module provides dynamic menu structures that do not require a page refresh in order to navigate a given menu. It can be found under the Content Display category.
Once you have found it, select the correct version, click Download, and save the Zipped file. It may be more expedient to create a directory, say Drupal downloads, to save these files to. That's all there is to downloading modules.
Before we move on, it's a good idea to take a look over the list of all modules available to see what is achievable with Drupal. For example, did you know that you can use Drupal as an e-commerce website, complete with products or services and a shopping cart?
Payment facilities such as PayPal, or credit cards and pretty much anything else that a fully- edged online store would need are readily implementable—or will be, once the ECommerce module has been upgraded to work with 6.x. Learning just what can be achieved with Drupal modules now can really cut down the amount of time spent developing or looking for solutions to problems later on.
Installing Modules
Each module can be different depending on how it needs to alter the system in order to function. The best way to learn about how to install modules is simply to go ahead and do it. Since we have already downloaded one, let's continue and install it.
Open up the .gz le saved on your machine (refer to the previous section). Depending on the module in question it will have anywhere from one le to tens of les. The first thing to do is open up the readme file as this will, more than likely, have some detailed information on what to expect from the module, and how it functions.
Assuming you have the right module for the job, the next task is to create a modules folder in sites/all or sites/default that will house all the contributed modules and keep them separate from the core modules in the modules folder—Drupal will automatically pick up any modules added to this new folder. With that done, extract the contents to the new modules folder:
Navigate to Modules under Site Building in the Administer menu section to see the results:
With some contributions performing their own database modifications behind the scenes, it is now easier to install a module (than it used to be), but it is also easier to shoot yourself in the foot. This is because the changes take place without your direct control. Admittedly, these changes, more often than not, are fairly harmless, but be cautious and make backups regardless.
That's pretty much all there is to do, but we still need to ensure that we can make use of this module from the administrator's point of view.
Enable the module and click Save configuration. Take note of the message highlighted in green as this will inform you of any updates and changes that are available, as shown in the following screenshot:
Note that in order to notify you of any important upgrades for modules and themes, Drupal requires the cron script to run. Once the cron has run, Drupal will recommend that you view the Available updates page (under Reports in Administer) to check on the status of each of the installed modules.
More on updates in a moment, first we still need to test out the module and put it to work, so navigate to the Blocks section of Site building. There will now be additional menu options, as shown in the following screenshot:
This specific module automatically creates a new DHTML menu for any menu that exists on the system and prefixes that menu name with DHTML:. In order to see the new menu in action, drag and drop the DHTML: Navigation block to the bottom of the Left sidebar region and then click Save blocks.
You should find now that there are two navigation menus in the left sidebar, with the bottom one being far more efficient in that it navigates without having the page refresh every time something is clicked. Play around with the new menu until you are satisfied it works correctly, then remove the old menu by dragging and dropping it to the Disabled region of the Blocks page.
The DHTML Menu module is a good example of how easy it can be to add some really nice features to a Drupal site. The problem for us is that this module is too easy to use— it doesn't really have much in the way of configuration parameters (although, it does have one or two) for us to make use of, so it hasn't really forced us to learn much more than how to download and install something.
What this means is that we can take a leisurely scroll over a variety of modules that have been made by someone, improved on by someone else, or changed into something else, and pick and choose the best. The converse of this is, of course, that any of your own developments can be made available to everyone else to use.
There are certain issues associated with using contributed modules such as the one we are going to incorporate into the demo site here. It is important to understand that people are providing useful software without enforcing payment. Please take it upon yourself to drop the developers a line every now and then to thank them for any functionality they have spent time and effort on.
Downloading Modules
The Drupal website houses a list of contributions that are available to add under the Modules tab of the Downloads page (http://drupal.org/project/modules). At the top of the Modules page there is a selection of Drupal versions from which you can choose the appropriate one, and then browse the modules by category, name or date, as shown in the following screenshot:
Obtaining the correct version is very important because a module developed for the 5.x family will almost certainly not work with the latest 6.x family. Unfortunately, the upgrading of contributions is not necessarily done at the same time as the core development; so it may be that there are some modules only built for older versions of Drupal—hopefully by the time you read this, most modules, if not all, will have been made compatible with 6.x.
For the purpose of demonstration, we will obtain a copy of a contribution that will save any site administrator a lot of time. The DHTML Menu module provides dynamic menu structures that do not require a page refresh in order to navigate a given menu. It can be found under the Content Display category.
Once you have found it, select the correct version, click Download, and save the Zipped file. It may be more expedient to create a directory, say Drupal downloads, to save these files to. That's all there is to downloading modules.
Before we move on, it's a good idea to take a look over the list of all modules available to see what is achievable with Drupal. For example, did you know that you can use Drupal as an e-commerce website, complete with products or services and a shopping cart?
Payment facilities such as PayPal, or credit cards and pretty much anything else that a fully- edged online store would need are readily implementable—or will be, once the ECommerce module has been upgraded to work with 6.x. Learning just what can be achieved with Drupal modules now can really cut down the amount of time spent developing or looking for solutions to problems later on.
Installing Modules
Each module can be different depending on how it needs to alter the system in order to function. The best way to learn about how to install modules is simply to go ahead and do it. Since we have already downloaded one, let's continue and install it.
Open up the .gz le saved on your machine (refer to the previous section). Depending on the module in question it will have anywhere from one le to tens of les. The first thing to do is open up the readme file as this will, more than likely, have some detailed information on what to expect from the module, and how it functions.
Assuming you have the right module for the job, the next task is to create a modules folder in sites/all or sites/default that will house all the contributed modules and keep them separate from the core modules in the modules folder—Drupal will automatically pick up any modules added to this new folder. With that done, extract the contents to the new modules folder:
Navigate to Modules under Site Building in the Administer menu section to see the results:
With some contributions performing their own database modifications behind the scenes, it is now easier to install a module (than it used to be), but it is also easier to shoot yourself in the foot. This is because the changes take place without your direct control. Admittedly, these changes, more often than not, are fairly harmless, but be cautious and make backups regardless.
That's pretty much all there is to do, but we still need to ensure that we can make use of this module from the administrator's point of view.
Enable the module and click Save configuration. Take note of the message highlighted in green as this will inform you of any updates and changes that are available, as shown in the following screenshot:
Note that in order to notify you of any important upgrades for modules and themes, Drupal requires the cron script to run. Once the cron has run, Drupal will recommend that you view the Available updates page (under Reports in Administer) to check on the status of each of the installed modules.
More on updates in a moment, first we still need to test out the module and put it to work, so navigate to the Blocks section of Site building. There will now be additional menu options, as shown in the following screenshot:
This specific module automatically creates a new DHTML menu for any menu that exists on the system and prefixes that menu name with DHTML:. In order to see the new menu in action, drag and drop the DHTML: Navigation block to the bottom of the Left sidebar region and then click Save blocks.
You should find now that there are two navigation menus in the left sidebar, with the bottom one being far more efficient in that it navigates without having the page refresh every time something is clicked. Play around with the new menu until you are satisfied it works correctly, then remove the old menu by dragging and dropping it to the Disabled region of the Blocks page.
The DHTML Menu module is a good example of how easy it can be to add some really nice features to a Drupal site. The problem for us is that this module is too easy to use— it doesn't really have much in the way of configuration parameters (although, it does have one or two) for us to make use of, so it hasn't really forced us to learn much more than how to download and install something.
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