drupal - short introduction

Drupalcontent-management framework

What is Drupal?

- free and open source

- written in PHP

- used for at least 2.1% of all websites

- initial release: January 2001

- under active development

- distributed under GNU General Public

Licence

Who uses Drupal?

Architecture

- Presentation Abstraction Control architecture

- what’s PAC?

Presentation- Abstraction- Control

- software architectural

pattern

- interaction- oriented

- further development of the

MVC architecture, more

complex

- structure of PAC

components instead of one

simply GUI

Presentation- Abstraction- Control

Control - processes external

events, updates the model.

Directly updates presentation

part. Then, passes the changes

to its parent component.

Abstraction - contains the

data.

Presentation - displays

information from the

Abstraction.http://www.dossier-andreas.net/software_architecture/pac.html

Architecture

- Presentation Abstraction Control architecture

- what’s PAC?

- core concept is a node - all pages are

stored in the same way

- set of related informations

- text, title, author, meta-data

- navigation and presentation layers are

separated

Architecture1. Collection of nodes - data pool

2. Modules - functional plugins

3. Blocks - can be configured to

output in various ways, as well

as only showing on certain

defined pages, or only for

certain defined users.

Menus are navigators which

defines the content coming on

each defined menu path.

4. Permissions are defined for

various roles. Users are

assigned to these roles in order

to grant them the defined

permissions.

5. Site theme- skin. Made up of

XHTML and CSS with PHP variables

coming from Drupal.

image: https://www.drupal.org/getting-started/before/overview

The core

- main element of Drupal

- isolated from added modules and themes

- easy update to new version of core without overwriting changes

Core modules

- optional modules that can be enabled by admin

- examples

- access statistics and logging

- caching

- descriptive URLs

- RSS feed

- user profiles

- access control restrictions

Modules

Database

Drupal Works with multiple DB systems,

usually MySQL, PostgreSQL.

- uses PHP Data Objects - interface for

accessing databases

- each type of information has its own DB

table

Community

- large community of users and developers

- in March 2015 about 1 200 000 user and

37 000 dev accounts

- multiple conferences, workshops and

DrupalCamps

- more info at https://www.drupal.

org/community

Drupal 8

- adoption of some Symfony components - use OOP!

- Twig as a default template engine

- inline content editing (Spark project)

- new toolbar - responsive and extensible

- ‘Views’ module incorporated into core

- better accessibility

- easier content creation - WYSIWYG replaced with

CKeditor

- RESTful interfaces

- improvements to language maintenance options, site

translations and more precise settings.

Useful links

- http://drupal.pl/

- https://www.drupal.org/

- http://www.drupal.com.pl/

- https://www.drupal.com/