On the Inside

I recently revamped the front page look at Ubercart.org in preparation for an eventual (hopefully sooner rather than later) first release. In the process, I learned once again that all the wonderful contributors have made Drupal an excellent tool for designing web pages. With a simple combination of Panels, Views, and Drupal's own content type creation, I was able to achieve what you see there with no headache whatsoever. It was just too easy!

What isn't necessarily easy is knowing the tools exist to do something like that and how to use them together for your site. I decided to spend some time writing up my experience, including the preliminary thought processes and then actual configuration of the modules, so others could benefit from my fun. The voice in the tutorial is pretty informal, but I trust it gets the job done. Also, I'm just darn proud of the end result and thought I'd put this up to get some feedback while helping people, too.

Purpose: Describe the thought processes and modules used to design the front page of Ubercart.org, a site designed to be both an information portal and user/developer community.

Modules explained: Drupal's own content type creation, Views, and Panels.

Honorable mentions: Deciding on what to display, visual aids, "enhancing" the forums and Navigation menu.

Well, the goal of this article is to explain to you how I constructed the front page at http://www.ubercart.org using some awesome contributed modules, a little bit of HTML, and some great free icons. We're preparing the place to be a community site, and a straight list of recent nodes just wouldn't cut it. I also didn't want to settle for a simple node that I update with new information every so often, so I finally got around to downloading the latest versions of the Panels and Views modules and set to work.

Instead of copying content from a blog post I made, I'm going to provide a short description of the post and a link to it for your viewing and learning pleasure. I have posted a walk-through tutorial that describes how I converted the Tagadelic module from its 4.7 version to the current 5.0. It's a rather simple starting place, and by following along you might be able to learn the skills to help yourself out the next time updates are needed. The post also includes a download of Tagadelic converted from 4.7 to 5.0 without any extra features added.

Blog post: http://ryan.grinhost.net/2006/tagadelic_drupal_5_0

Handbook page covering module updates: http://drupal.org/node/64279

Javascript can be very easily used to randomize the display of your page. In this tutorial, I will show a simple example of using the document object to set the title of a page to a random value. We will also use an array and the math object for rounding and random numbers. So, here we go...

Using Drupal 4.7, the uncomplicated theme, and the contributed modules chatroom, logintoboggan and smileys, I have created a chat site for a freeware game company called RndLabs. The chat is for their excellent multi-player, third person shooter BaboViolent 2. I highly recommend the game, but I'm also going to use this page to describe how I created the chat site, BaboChat.

If you're wanting to add a timed event to your web page, you will find the setTimeout() function offered by Javascript to be an adequate tool. For example, after about a minute of reading this page, an alert box will pop up to say hello. This is a really simple function that adds an event timer of sorts to your page. It takes two arguments, a string of code to be executed and a delay time in milliseconds:

Incredible set of tutorials for Drupal from a developer's perspective. I'm posting this so I can find it later.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/osource/implement.html

(They keep adding to these tutorials, so be sure to check back. They're very thorough and cover just about any aspect of building a Drupal site and developing modules imaginable!)