Under the Hood

Just like a car, you don't need to know all the inner workings to operate this website, but sometimes you just like to know what's under the hood.

We must assume that you already know a bit about Drupal 7 otherwise this would be a very, very long read. For experienced users, you know that Drupal has thousands of modules and configuration options and it just isn't possible to know it all, but knowledge can be transferable. Most of what you see will seem at least somewhat familiar and with a bit of exploration you will find what you need and figure out how to do things.

There is much functionality built in and it will take some time to familiarize yourself. This page has been created to help shorten your learning curve somewhat.

The Build:

This site is built on a base of the Drupal Content Management System (CMS) version 7. We chose this platform for several reasons. Primarily because Drupal is open source and free, and so are its modules and many of its themes. Our audience is volunteer Neighborhood Watch groups and we know that means not much money is available for technology. Drupal fulfills our needs quite capably, without a huge investment of cash. Version 7 was chosen because we wanted stability and functionality. Many of the modules used here are either not yet ported to version 8 or not stable on that platform. We needed a site that just works, not one that we had to work at all the time.

The Engine:

Drupal sites use a combination of static files and a dynamic back-end database. The database is powered by MySQL and can be adminstered with standard tools like PHPMyAdmin. You have been provided with a compressed image of the required files as well as a starter database. Once installed, these have to be linked together by editing the system settings file. We also provide a local CSS file to override a few of the appearance settings as required, and we have performed minor edits to system files to display our copyright notice in the footer (which according to our license, you are not permitted to remove). Apart from these minor changes we have strived to leave all original system files intact, making future upgrades easier to manage.

The Look:

To start with, we've included a slightly customized version of the popular Skeleton theme to give your site a look and feel that we liked (see mention of CSS and copyright above). Skeleton is a responsive theme, so it adjusts itself for different mobile devices. You will find selectable options in the 'Appearance' section of your administrative page. Other themes are also included but to be honest, we have not tested all features as thoroughly with these others, so you may or may not have to do a bit of tweaking if you like their look better than Skeleton's. Keep in mind that not all of the included themes are responsive designs. There are of course, other themes available for download from the Drupal repository.

The Tools:

Some of the included tools available to administrators include the usual, like WYSIWYG editing. We also adopted the Elfinder File Manager, Dashboard, and Workbench modules to help organize and perform administrative tasks. We provide image galleries and file repositories, and two kinds of advertising based revenue generators (see Revenue Opportunities in this book). You'll find user roles and permissions already set up in a sane way, so in most cases you can quickly get users registered and assigned to roles and working with the new system, with a minimum of effort. Predefined roles include Administrator, Manager, Content Editor, Moderator, Paid Supporter and standard Member. We used the Advanced Forum module to provide for categorized user discussions, but also for realtime user-to-user chat we included Shoutbox. User Polls are also provided as an easy way to gauge the opinion of your users on topics of interest. Lastly, we included the User Alerts module and a predefined block for persistent user alerts, either of which can be used to get your members attention and tell them about urgent news, such as earthquake, hurricane, or missing persons.

How To:

We decided to limit the amount of help files included because at least from an admistrator's perspective, you really should have some prior experience already. However, we did craft some basic help files for your users that you can expand on as needed for the specifics of your own website.

Where to Find More Help:

In addition to this page, there is extensive help available for most of the installed modules, directly from their respective authors. To access these resources, simply click 'Help' on your administrative menu. You might also want to explore Drupal's online community forums for peer assistance.