Over the past few days, I’ve been busy updating a lot of Drupal based websites that I’ve helped set up and host. In doing so, I thought it might be helpful to review some of the modules and themes that I’ve been working with.

One site interesting site is www.tjntiy.com. I used a slightly modified version of the chameleon theme for the overall look and feel. What made this site interesting is some of the modules and other tweaks done.

One of the first modifications was to add a few other different ‘content types’. Each content type is pretty much the same, but using different content types allowed the content to be grouped nicely for other functions like voting and views.

For voting, I installed the Voting API. Then, I added the Fivestar module. This module allows people to vote on pages on a scale of one to five. You can change the scale if you want. However, the website owner felt this didn’t really do what she wanted, so we changed over to the Vote Up/Down module, which worked nicely for the application.

Then, we added the views module. This allows pages to be created viewing the content in different ways. So, we set up a view of the content based on the most popular as well as randomly selected content. This was also one of the first sites that I added the Facebook Connect module which allows people to log into a Drupal site using their Facebook account and share information from Facebook into Drupal.

One decision of the website owner was to allow anonymous people to post content. This is a recipe for spam, and after a while we started getting a lot of spam. With other sites I’ve used CAPTCHA, but I haven’t always been happy with the results. So for this site, I used the AntiSpam module which worked quite nicely.

I was hoping to go into more details about these modules, but I ended up spending quite a while helping another person set up a Drupal based website. They are using the litejazz theme which I’ve really enjoyed starting to play with. Litejazz includes nice dropdown menus. It is similar to the nice_menus module, but you can use them on the menu bar using “suckerfish”. They also want to control access to nodes by users’ roles. Previously, I had used the node_privacy_by_role module. However, that module seemed cumbersome, and especially messy when upgrading from one major version of Drupal to the next. For this site, I ended up using the content_access module which I’ve been very pleased with so far.

Now, the long day is drawing to a close. Other interruptions are coming in via email, so I’ll post this now. If you’re a Drupal user, let me know with themes and modules you like best.

Update: No sooner did I update to the latest version of Drupal than they came up with another core update. I also discovered that update to the Facebook Connect module caused all the parameters to get lost, so I've got plenty of additional updating to do now.