DRUPAL TUTORIAL: Drupal 8 Beginner to Advanced in 8 PROJECTS

In this current lesson, let us see how Drupal 8.x looks - absolutely fresh off the installation. On your screen now you see the what is called by Drupal as the "Front Page". If you are already logged in, just logout for this lesson. The front page is the initial page seen by someone reaching your Drupal site, typically before a login. Inside Drupal, in the Navigation bar and in the breadcrumb and elsewhere - this page is also called as "Home". It is the same.

We will see many examples of this front page in coming lessons, but most typically, a visitor will get the first exposure to your site from here. We will see how to configure this page in detail later.

In this lesson we will continue from where we left previously.

There are still some things about the site that need to be changed. For example, the official Drupal logo is showing up - instead of our company logo. The site's favicon needs to be changed. And I also want to change the branding colours of the site.

All of these can be done from the "Appearance" section of Drupal.

Conclusion to our Company Brochure Website Project.

The next thing we have to put in place are these two additional pages - a page that showcases watches offered by the company. Another page for a standard "About us" - which will give company information.

And finally, a fully functional "Contact Us" form page.

Create a One-page very simple site / classic brochure website on your own

Content is the fundamental building block of any website. Content is what drives visitors to any site. And Content is also the reason why visitors give up on some websites - if their expectation is not met. It does not matter if your site is created with Drupal or some other product from the market. The visitor will NOT care. CONTENT is the real king.

Having said that - how well do we really understand content? In the simplest of definitions, content is any combination of text, pictures, video, audio, graphics, or any other specialized information. I will now show several examples to reiterate this critical point.

The focus of this lesson is on "Article" Content Type.

The Article will have ALL the field components that Page has - PLUS a few more options. Let me enumerate them now:

1. Firstly you can associate "Tags" with article type.
2. An image can be linked to the article. And, yes, this image is different from the images that you can embed in the article body itself.
3. Third important difference is that Articles can be opened up to comments from visitors to your site. You can see an additional feature provided here. This is not available with Page type.

So, these are the 3 main structural differences. But there are display and behavioral differences too.

In this lesson you will see Drupal's Article content type in great detail. I will urge you to replicate what you saw in these lessons to get a hands-on feel. 

There are a number of important points about Drupal Article behavior that you have to observe now.

1st point - Notice what all gets shown for a single article. The title is shown prominently, followed by publication details - the author and time of release. The image that you see here is the "article image". This is not an image that was embedded in the body. You can also see tags we created - they all function as links - more about that shortly.

Observe that the text you see here - is NOT the full body of the article. It is just a part of the body. The terminology used for this is a "TEASER" or a "summary". There is a "read more" link - and t will lead to a full view of the article.

Finally, it is possible visitors to add comments on the article. They have to be logged in to be able to do that. All of these nuances with comments are fully configurable.

2nd point - In this listing, Drupal articles will appear sorted in a REVERSE CHRONOLOGICAL order. What this means is that - the latest news article will appear at the top of the page - and older articles will appear lower.

This is perfect behavior - we will not want yesterday's news to appear at the top of a newspaper.

3rd point - I will open a couple of articles for you to see how they will look. See here that the article is much longer than the teaser shown in the listings page.

In this lesson, we will will look at another critical aspect of managing content. And that is working with content in bulk. Modifying several pieces of content in one shot!

The interface provided by Drupal for that is the "Content" page - from the "content" link on the admin menu - or from the "Shortcuts" fast link also. Both point to the same page. 

In this new project, we will create a Blog. Blogs are ubiquitous on the web - an estimated 200 million blogs exist on the internet today. This is a testimony to their appeal and design. My intention in this lesson is to get you intimately familiar with the Blog design.

Let's see some popular blogs - both personal and corporate. All of these examples have millions of pageviews per month but they are not necessarily built with Drupal, it doesn't matter for this lesson.

I am starting the Blog Project with a clean Drupal 8.2.6 installation.

Here is a quick look at my localhost Apache installation - in case you are wondering how I am structuring the exercises. I have 2 folders called "drupexer" and "drupsandbox". The "Drupsandbox" I use to design the projects and do all my experiments, before I start any of the lessons. You will not need to do this. The reason I have complete duplicates is to give you well planned, fast and tight lessons!

Once the design is complete, I replicate the same completely in the "drupexer" folder. You can have as many drupal installations on the servers. They will impart no load on the server unless they are running. You can also replicate this structure for your project exercises.

In this lesson, we will be starting with a very important concept called as Role Based Access Control (often abbreviated as RBAC). Drupal has a well designed role based system that controls what every user on the system can SEE or DO on Drupal - based on the role assigned to them.

This is a fundamental part of any non-trivial website. This is what allows you to create userid/passwords on the system. In the simplest example, this allows the "Content Creator" role to create content - and this also prevents a casual visitor to your site from accidentally editing or deleting your material.

Let's first understand the meaning of a role. Every organization, every team game, every social construct have roles in them - and you will already be familiar with this in real life scenarios. Football has roles like the goalkeeper, the captain, referee or umpire - and so on. These are all roles - they have permissions to do certain things which others can not do.

In exactly the same way, Drupal also has the concept of "Roles".

In the previous lesson, you learnt the fundamentals of roles and permissions in Drupal. In this lesson, I will start with another dimension - that is Drupal's user account management.

On almost any kind of site you build, you will want your visitors to create user accounts on your site. Whether it is for something as simple as leaving comments on your site - or for using your web application. I had mentioned in the previous lesson, that the complete RBAC and a powerful user management functionality comes to you out-of-the-box in Drupal Core.

When you design a new site, you must decide how new users are created for your site. You can control all of this from the "Account settings" screen. Traverse from the "Configuration" admin menu -> and choose Account Settings.

The focus of this lesson is Drupal account creation. There are 3 main techniques in which accounts can be created on Drupal.

Type 1: Admin (or any role with correct permissions set) can manually create an account.
Type 2: The visitor creates an account by themselves. Possible only if this is allowed by the administrator.
Type 3: Administrator can create accounts in bulk. For example if you want to add 500 users to your website you use this technique. This is possible through some external modules - and is not a part of Drupal Core.

In this lesson, I will talk about several advanced points that I intentionally did not cover while creating the Forum project. 

The focus of this complete section and the next is on User Experience of your Drupal site.

User Experience is often shortened to UX - and it encompasses more than just the look and feel - including usability, accessibility, look and feel - and overall making your website a useful productive experience.

In this lesson, I will give step-by-step instructions on how to install a new theme for your Drupal 8 LOCALHOST installation. This same steps are valid even if you are uploading to a server - or even if you are using an earlier version like Drupal 7.

You will have a lot of fun playing with themes - and it is highly educational. So I recommend that you experiment hands-on with as many themes as possible on your test installation.

In this lesson, you will see where to find themes that you can download and use in your Drupal installation.

Essentially, Drupal themes are of two types. Free themes and Premium (i.e. paid) themes. Do NOT be mistaken by the word "Premium". Here it only means "a fee is charged". It DOES NOT mean a paid theme will automatically be of a higher quality. NOR should you assume that free themes will automatically be of a lower quality.

There is a complete spectrum of quality on either types - though the word "Premium" cleverly seems to imply "superior quality or value" - make no assumptions. We will come to evaluating quality in a later lesson. Right now, our focus is on WHERE to find themes.

In either cases both types are open-source. That means you will have access to the source code. It also means that you will be at freedom to modify the source code as you seem fit. But in the case of Premium themes, of course, you will have to pay a fee to use the theme. There will be other licensing constraints depending on the individual theme you decide to use - please do the due diligence.

Here is a printable checklist that will show you how to make a "Theme selection decision". 

You can apply the rules not only to Themes, but to all other types of external modules also.