Body Building: Modules You Need to Build Attractive Pages with Rich Content

You've installed Drupal. Congratulations! You can now create pages and stories that contain text. Sorry, no images. Or video. And if you want the text to be formatted with bold, colors, bulleted lists, or links, you'll need to do that manually, using html tags. At this point, you might be thinking, why all the buzz around Drupal? Is it useful for anything besides creating a simple blog? And if that's all you want to do, scrap Drupal, and get an account on WordPress instead. But then, hopefully, someone fills you in on the secret to Drupal. Despite initial appearances, it's actually super powerful! Anything you can imagine, you can do! There's over 4,000 modules on drupal.org to choose from. All you need to do is figure out which 100 or so you need, and voila, pure website awesomeness!

This session will cover the modules to get you started with getting all sorts of goodness into your node content. The Wysiwyg module for changing text fields that require hand-coded html into word-processing-like editors. CCK and ImageField for uploading images. Another half dozen or so modules to make working with text and images smoother. But wait, there's also the Embedded Media Field module for getting media from a 3rd party website (like YouTube) into your content, and the SWF Tools module for getting audio and video files that you upload to your own website (for media that you want to retain rights to that you would lose if you put it on YouTube) into your content. And with a few more modules, you can mix in RSS feeds, calendars, and more.

Then things really get interesting! How do you manage all of these pieces? Do you stick them all into the text editor? Lots of people take this approach, and there's some nice modules to help with this, but for some people, it can get overwhelming and too hard to maintain a decent level of attractiveness and design consistency. Do you create separate nodes for the pieces, and then create other nodes that pull in these nodes? This approach also has its benefits and challenges. There's also the soon-to-be released Body Builder module that presents a 3rd option with its own bonuses and drawbacks. This session will explore all three approaches, when you might want to use each one, and which modules can assist with each approach.

If you're brand new to Drupal, you'll find this fast-paced and you won't remember all of it, but you'll get a sense of what's possible, and will have notes of what to look into for more detail when you need it. If you're a seasoned Drupal user, you might enjoy this review of important modules, and come away with a couple new tricks.