Feb 12, 2013

This week we roll out the first batch of videos in our "Advanced Site Building for Drupal 7" collection. These videos address the growing importance of the 'site builder' in Drupal site development, what administration tools can help speed up the building process, and how we can quickly set up a prototype site on our local machine. There will be more to come, but if these videos don't get you excited about the power of site building, then ... well, try watching them again on double-speed.

Welcome to "Advanced Site Building"

In this video, we give a quick introduction to the new video series and describe the set of modules we'll be covering, including Panels, Display Suite, Views, Feeds, a slew of administrative tools and more.

About our project and how project roles work

In this video series we build a practical Drupal site for a company called GiftOfGeek, one of those businesses we all wish we worked at that specializes in geeky products like USB-powered phosphorescent Zen gardens. We also take a look at how tasks are typically split across a web team.

What a "site builder" is and the powerful tools they work with

Throughout this series, we'll be focusing on the role of 'site builder'. In this video we explain where that role begins and ends, and the kinds of tools they use to get their work done.

What wireframes are and where to find them in our resource pack

If you talk to anyone who's had to work with clients to build a web site, they'll tell you how dangerous it is to start with a design. Instead, if you distill the major informational components into a black and white 'wireframe', you give the client a sense of what goes where, without issues like colors and padding getting in the way. In this series we begin with some wireframes, and this video shows you where to find them.

Identifying the components in our blog home page wireframe

The first wireframe we look at is our blog home page. Although it's unassuming and seemingly fairly simple, it touches on a number of techniques and Drupal modules that we'll have to understand in order to make it happen. In this video we discuss the various components of the page briefly and link them up with the modules that will help us build it.

Reviewing our blog post and review page wireframes

Our client site is focusing on two major features: a blog and product reviews, and now that we're hopefully getting into our wireframe groove, we wrap up by looking at our blog post and review page wireframes. These wireframes will set a good foundation for us to explore some different ways of laying out content as we work through this series.

About our step-by-step approach

Thinking about our project in terms of modules and tasks can get overwhelming. We're instead going to take a do-one-thing-at-a-time approach that works well in the real world as long as you don't have too many site building coworkers working on the same project. In this video we talk about that approach.

How to set up our Drupal installation with Acquia Dev Desktop

In previous videos we've talked about installing a default Drupal site with Acquia Dev Desktop, but we're also not ones for skipping steps. So in this video we set up our Drupal site exactly the way you're going to see it for the rest of the series.

About the administration modules we'll be using

Before we start building out our site, we're going to install a few modules to help make the building faster and easier. In this video we briefly talk about the modules we'll be installing and why.

How to install a module the traditional way and configure the Administration Menu module

Throughout this series, we're going to be installing a lot of modules. If you're new to Drupal, we're going to illustrate in this video the traditional way to install a module by downloading it and moving it to your module folder. But there's better ways, and we'll be talking about those next. In this video we also configure the Administration menu to replace our existing top-of-the-page menu with a slick drop-down.

How to install a module using Drush, and how we approach installing modules in this series

It's okay to be afraid of the command line, but at BuildAModule we've put together a series of videos that should help you get over that fear. The payoff is that you get to use Drush to speed up many time consuming tasks like installing modules. In this video we show you how you can shave a minute or so off of each module installation, and a bit about how to make sure Drush works properly with our Acquia Dev Desktop installation. From here on out, whenever we install a module, we're going to flash a screen up with information about the module so you can choose whatever method you're comfortable with to install it.

10 FREE new site-building videos released on BuildAModule from the "Advanced Site Building" video collection