In last week’s episode I mapped out our goal for this series: learn how to understand Drupal from the perspective of a Filemaker developer.
Following our motto of “Shut up and Fix it”, we’re going to simply create a Drupal web site. We’ll build a storefront that has products and a small blog attached. Once that is running, we’ll attach the Drupal site to a FileMaker back end system. This will allow us to pull product info from the back end system and possibly have users log in and track their orders. That’s the end state we’ll be working toward in this series.
This week let’s expand our understanding a bit by taking a walk through the Content Construction Kit (CCK).
You’ll remember that last week we learned that a “Content Type” is analogous to a Table. By default Drupal gives us two fields in each table: Title and Body. In order to make a useful database, we are going to need to add more fields to each table.
At its heart Drupal is a Content Management System. Since the content that Drupal is designed to manage is typically a blog, the default Content Types in drupal are a Page and a Story.
The Page Content Type is normally for info that doesn’t change often, and a Story is typically used for things that change often. Remember these are only the Drupal defaults; as with Filemaker, you are expected and encouraged to change the setup as appropriate.
We’re going to be using the Story content type for our store blog. If all you are doing with Drupal is writing a blog, you’re basically done. Stop reading here!
For this project, however, we plan to do a bit more, so we’ll need to add some more descriptors into Drupal.
The last couple of installments were about understanding the basics of what makes a Drupal web site. We covered nodes, views, and plugins, among other things. We didn’t go unnoticed either. While at the 2011 DevCon, I was featured on an episode of FileMaker Success Tips.
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