Drupal 7 includes a blog module that makes it easy for users with the proper permissions to author and publish blog entries on your website. To demonstrate how easy it is to set up blogging on your site, let's enable the Blog module and set blogging up so that users assigned to a role of "blogger" have the ability to blog on your new website.

The first step is to enable the Blog module. Click on the Module link in the menu at the top of the page to see the list of modules that are available and enabled on your site. Near the top of the list of Core modules you will see the Blog module. If you have not yet enabled that module, you can do so by clicking on the check box and scrolling to the bottom of the screen, where you will click on "Save configuration."

Clicking on "Save configuration" installs the Blog module and makes all of the capabilities associated with blogging available to those Drupal users on your site who are assigned to a role with the permissions that provides access to Drupal's blogging features.

The next step is to create a "blogger" user role. To create the role, click on the People link in the menu at the top of the page. Once on the People configuration page, click on the Permissions tab. On the Permissions configuration page, click on the Roles link at the top right-hand corner. On the Roles configuration page, enter "blogger" in the blank text box in the Name column and click on "Add role."

Now that you have the role created, the next step is to set the permissions so that a user assigned to the blogger role will have the ability to create and edit blog entries. On the Roles page, click on the "Edit permissions" link for the blogger role to view the Permissions configuration page. On the Permissions page, scroll down and check the boxes for the following permissions:

Once these are checked, click on "Save permissions." Next, create a test user account and assign that account to the blogger role. To create the account, click on the People link in the menu at the top of the page. On the People configuration page, click on "Add user." On the Account Information page, enter "testuser" as the username, "[email protected]" as the e-mail address, and "test123" as the password. Then check the blogger role in the list of assigned roles. Finally, click "Create new account" at the bottom of the page.

The next step is to log out of your site (you're currently logged in as the administrator) and log in as the test user that you just created. Click on "Log out" at the top of the page and then log back in using the new "testuser" account. Once logged in, click on "Add new content."

Clicking "Add new content" reveals the Create Blog entry page. On this page, you'll find a text field for entering the title of your blog posting and a text area for authoring your blog posting. Create a blog posting that describes how much you enjoy using Drupal. When finished writing, click the Save button at the bottom of the page. Congratulations! You just blogged on your new Drupal website. The sample blog posting that I created is shown in Figure 9-1.

Figure 9-1. A sample blog posting

Look at the structure of the post. You'll see that Drupal automatically displays the date and time of the posting, along with the name of the user who wrote it. The blog posting is displayed in Teaser mode, as indicated by the "Read more" link at the bottom. If you wish to adjust the length of the blog-posting teaser, please refer to Chapter 10. Finally, a blog posting permits site visitors to post comments in response—a good way of hooking users to your site by making it interactive.

Drupal uses a specific URL structure for displaying blog entries. For example, http://localhost/blog/1. In this URL the keyword "blog" tells Drupal that you wish to render a list of blog entries, while the "1" represents the user ID (UID) of the person who wrote the blog entries. In the example, "1" is the admin user. You can find the UID of any user by simply clicking on the People link in the top menu bar and hovering over the Edit link for that specific user. As you hover over the Edit link, look in the browser's status bar at the bottom of the page, where you will see a URL such as http://localhost/user/2/edit. The value after the "/user/" represents the UID of that user, and the value that you would insert in the URL for viewing that person's blog postings (for example, http://localhost/blog/2). Locate the UID of the testuser account and view the blog-listing page of that user.

Drupal automatically sorts blog postings by the date they were created, with the newest item posted at the top of the list and the oldest item at the bottom. To demonstrate this feature and to see a more complete example of the blogging feature, add two additional blog postings following the steps outlined previously. When complete, visit the blog-listing page for your testuser account. Figure 9-2 shows my blog postings.

Figure 9-2. Sample blog postings page for the test user account

Unless your site is purely focused on a blog, you'll likely want to provide site visitors with a mechanism for viewing recent blog posts. The Blog module provides a block that you can place on a page to automatically list the most recent blog postings made on your site. To assign that block to a region on your theme, click the Structure link at the top of the page, followed by the Blocks link on the Structure page.

On the Blocks page, scroll down and locate the "Recent blog posts" block. Change the region from <none> to "Right sidebar" (for demonstration purposes) and click "Save blocks" at the bottom of the page. Return to the homepage of your website (close the blocks page by clicking on the X) and refresh the page. You should then see a new block in the right column that shows your most recent blog posts (see Figure 9-3).

Figure 9-3. Recent blog postings block

Visitors can then click on an individual blog posting to read it, or they can click on More to visit a page that shows all of the recent blog entries on your site.

To enable the Forums module, click on the Modules link in the top menu and scroll down the page until you see the Forum module. Check the box associated with the module and click the Save configuration button at the bottom of the page. Drupal will install the Forums module.

The next step in the process is to set permissions for forums. Here are the permissions that you can set:

Only site administrators should be assigned the ability to "Administer forums," "Edit any forum topic content," and "Delete any forum topic content." If you want users, including anonymous users, to have the ability to post content to your forums, you will need to enable "Create new forum topic content," "Edit own forum topic content," and "Delete own forum topic content" for anonymous users, registered users, or any specific user roles you have defined. For our example site, check the boxes for authenticated users for the Create, Edit, and Delete own forum topics.

Creating forums is a simple two-step process: creating the container that will house your forum topics, and then creating the forum topics that site visitors can respond to.

To create the container, simply click on the Structure link on the top menu. On the Structure page, click on the Forum link. Drupal then displays the Forums administration page. On this page, you have the ability to create new containers and new forum topics. Containers hold topics, and your site can have multiple containers if the need arises. For demonstration purposes, we will create a new container titled "Our Experience with Drupal 7" by clicking on Add container."

As shown in Figure 9-5, on the "Add container" form we only need to enter the title of our container and a brief description of the purpose and content of the forum that we're about to create.

Figure 9-5. Creating a new forum container

After entering the title and the description, click the Save button to create the container. Drupal then redisplays the main Forum configuration page with our new container listed (see Figure 9-6).

Figure 9-6. A listing of forum containers

With our container in place, we can now add forums to which the site visitors can post questions and responses. Click on "Add forum," which reveals the Forums page. On this page, we specify the name of our forum, provide a brief description of what the purpose of the forum is, and select the container where the forum should reside. See Figure 9-7. After entering the forum name and description, look in the Parent drop-down list for the container that you created in the previous step. When you have selected it, click Save.

Figure 9-7. Creating a forum

Based on the subject area of our container, Drupal 7, there are likely a number of forums that we could create to facilitate online discussions. Continue to add various forums until you feel that you have a broad enough selection to address the common topics that will arise on your forum. Figure 9-8 shows a number of additional forums added to our container, all of which are topics that are appropriate for the general topic of our forums.

Figure 9-8. Listing of forums

With all of the forums set up, you can visit the Forum page of your website by going to http://localhost/forum. You'll see something like Figure 9-9.

Figure 9-9. The Forums page

Site visitors who are interested in a specific forum, such as the one on installing Drupal, would click on the forum title, revealing all of the related discussion topics. Figure 9-10 demonstrates what the Installing Drupal forum would look like populated with a number of relevant topics.

Figure 9-10. The Installing Drupal Forum

A site visitor with the proper permissions who had something to discuss (like a question about installing Drupal on Ubuntu) could respond to an existing forum topic by clicking on the related topic (Installing Drupal on Linux), revealing a basic form where they can enter the subject and the comment they want to post (see Figure 9-11).

Figure 9-11. Responding to a Forum Topic as a user

After entering the values and clicking Save, navigate back to the forum for installing Drupal by clicking on the link for Installing Drupal. You can now see in Figure 9-12 that our forum topic has a new comment that visitors can read and post comments to.

Figure 9-12. A Forum Topic with a comment

Drupal core's forum module has a rather limited feature set. A contributed module called "advanced forum" (http://drupal.org/project/advanced_forum) provides a number of enhanced features, such as "mark all topics in a single forum or all forums as read," forum statistics including number of topics, posts, users, latest user, and currently online users, shows number of new posts in addition to core's number of new topics, and numerous other features.

To create a poll, click the "Add content" link on your site, which reveals the list of content types that you have enabled on your Drupal installation. On that list, you will now see a content type titled poll (see Figure 9-13).

Figure 9-13. Creating a new poll

Click on the Poll link, revealing the form that you will use to create the poll. As an example, create a new poll that asks site visitors to vote on whether U.S. college football should adopt a playoff structure like the National Football league. Follow the example in Figure 9-14 and create the poll by entering the question and the answers from which you want visitors to select. Hopefully the fourth answer receives the most votes!

Two key options are also shown in Figure 9-14:

For demonstration purposes, you can leave the status as Active and the duration as Unlimited. Click the Save button and voila, you have an online poll!

Figure 9-14. Entering the details of a new poll

Drupal displays your new online poll, ready for visitors to place their votes (see Figure 9-15).

Figure 9-15. Your first online poll

You'll notice in Figure 9-15 that there are several links at the top of your poll that allow you the site administrator to manage and monitor the poll. You can do the following:

The Tracker module is a Drupal 7 core module that provides information about the referring site that directed the user to the poll, the user ID of the user if they're logged in on the site, and the date/time they placed their vote. Tracker can be a useful tool if you're trying to analyze what visitors are doing on your site and where they came from. To enable Tracker follow the instructions outlined in Chapter 8.

Select one of the options and click on the Vote button. Drupal displays the total number of votes for each of the options and allows you to cancel your vote if you change your mind. Click through the various links at the top of the page to see the reports that the poll module provides you.

To make your poll visible to site visitors, you could provide a menu link to the poll by using the techniques I described earlier in this book (for example, adding a menu item), or you could use another feature of the polls module, which is a block that lists the latest poll. To enable this feature, click on the Structure link on the top menu, and on the Structure page click on the Blocks link. On the Blocks configuration page, scroll down until you see the "Most recent poll" item, and change the region to either the left or right sidebar. Once you have selected the region, click Save and navigate to the homepage of your website. Your poll is now displayed in the right (or left) sidebar of your website, available for visitors to place their votes.

The example that we are using is an online forms-based suggestion box. On this form, we will allow site visitors to enter a suggestion, pick from a list of categories that fit their suggestion, indicate whether they would like us to follow up on their suggestion, and require that they provide us with their e-mail address so that we can contact them.

The first step in the creation process is to click on the Content link in the menu at the top of every page, revealing the Content administration page. On this page, click "Add new content." Click on the Webform content type listed on the "Add new content" page's list of content types, bringing you to the first page of the Webform creation process (see Figure 9-16). On this page, enter the title of your Webform, as well as an introduction to what you are asking the user to fill out. For the example, enter Suggestions Box as the title and write a simple introductory statement in the Body field. Then click Save.

Figure 9-16. Create Webform configuration page

The next page you see is for creating the form components or fields (see Figure 9-17). There are three attributes to set for each field: the label that will appear with the field, the type of field you want to display, and an indicator that specifies whether the field is mandatory. The first field that we will create in our example is the text area, where the visitor will enter their suggestion. Enter My Suggestion Is in the text box provided for the label, select Textarea as the type of field we want to use, and set the field to mandatory by checking the box. Then click Add.

Figure 9-17. Adding a form component

Next you'll see a page that lists options you can set for the new field. On this page you can set the following:

For our example, enter this in the Description field: "Please enter your suggestion in the box above. Be as descriptive as possible." After entering the description, click Submit.

After clicking Submit, the module redisplays the Form components page. Using the steps outlined previously, create a "Select options" field that allows the visitor to specify what their suggestion is related to. Enter My Suggestion Is Related To in the label field, pick the Select options value in the Type field, check the Mandatory box, and click the Add button. The page that is displayed after clicking Add has the same elements listed above with the exception of a new field where we enter the options that the visitor can select from (see Figure 9-18) and three configuration options for setting whether you want the Select options component to allow visitors to select multiple items from the list, whether the component should be displayed as a Listbox, and whether the options should be displayed in a random order. For our example, we will leave the Multiple check box unchecked, we'll enter the options as shown in Figure 9-18, and we will check the Listbox checkbox. After updating the values, click Submit.

Figure 9-18. Defining the options for a Select options component

Next, create is a field for entering the visitors' e-mail addresses. Follow the steps outlined above using My Email Address as the label for the field, pick the Textfield value from the list of Types, check the Mandatory check box, and click the Add button. Follow the steps outlined previously on the second screen.

You should now have all of the fields defined for your form. The next step is to set the value for where e-mails should be sent when visitors submit information through your form. Click on the E-mails link near the top of the Webform configuration page, revealing a form where you can define who receives the e-mailed results of a visitor submitting the form. In the Address field, enter your e-mail address as the default recipient of the information. You can also click on the Add button to enable sending the information to more than one person.

The final step in the process is to click on the Form settings link at the top of the Webform configuration page. On this page, you can enter a message that will be displayed on the screen after the visitor submits their form. For our example, enter "Thank you for submitting your suggestion." You may also enter a Redirect URL. Entering a value in this field directs the module to display the page associated with the URL after the users submits the form. You may also set how many forms a visitor may submit, reducing the likelihood of malicious users submitting hundreds of suggestions to your site. When complete, click the "Save configuration" button.

Your form is now ready to be used on your site. You can view the form by clicking on the View link at the top of the Webform configuration page. If you followed the example your form should look something like Figure 9-19.

Figure 9-19. The Suggestions Box form

Give your form a test drive. Enter at least two suggestions, then click on the Results link near the top of the form.

The page that is displayed (see Figure 9-20) provides several tools that you can use to manage the data submitted by visitors. Click through the links (Submissions, Analysis, Table, Download, and Clear) to see what the module has to offer.

Figure 9-20. Viewing form submissions