This is a redesign of the blog, which runs on Drupal 6 and features a blog and photo galleries. It’s not the first Drupal-based theme I’ve ever created, but certainly the one I’m happiest with.

If you want to know a little bit more about the process behind designing the site, I wrote about my aims for the site, then followed up today with some notes on why I made certain design decisions.

My feeling is that the design is quite unique and a good starting point for establishing an identifiable presence on the Internet. Here’s a screen-shot:

I’ll have a bit more information on this design in the portfolio in the neat future.

Drupal 6 offers built-in actions that can be performed whenever something happens on your site. Typically, you want to use this to get an alert when someone publishes content on the site, or a new user signs up.

You might even want to mimic WordPress and get an email alert every time someone leaves a comment on the site. I’m going to show you how to set this up for your site.

Defining Triggers and Actions

First, let’s take a look at what triggers and actions actually are. A trigger is an event which will happen on your site. Triggers that I can see on my site are Comments, Content, Cron, Taxonomy and Users.

If you look at the available triggers for Comments, you’ll see various trigger types. The one we’re interested in is “After saving a new comment”.

Before you can activate a trigger, you need to specify an Action. This is the action you want to happen each time a trigger is ..er.. triggered. You can do a number of things with actions, such as redirect users to a URL or give them a message on the page. However, we’re mostly interested in the Send Email action.

Step By Step Instructions

OK. So let’s set up a simple action and trigger combo to send us an email each time a comment is left on our Drupal site.

• Before you start: Make sure you’ve got the trigger module activated. Browse to Administer -> Site Building -> Modules and check that Trigger is enabled. If not, switch it on, obviously!
• Now, let’s set up our action – browse to Administer -> Site Configuration -> Actions. Drop down the Make a new advanced action box and select Send e-mail. Click Create.
• Set up your alert email with an easy to recognise Description and Subject – I used “New Comment on [Sitename]” for mine. Enter the email address of the person who’s supposed to receive the alert (probably you) and then enter a short message – you should see some variables underneath the text field showing variables you can use.
• Save your changes et voila, your action is configured. Now to attach it to a trigger…
• Browse to the Trigger page in Adminster -> Site Building -> Triggers. Click the Comments tab and drop down the list underneath After saving a new comment. You should see your email in the list – select it and click Assign.
• Job done – your action has been configured.

Don’t Forget To Test

You didn’t think we were finished yet, did you? Now you need to test that the triggers are working correctly.

Just to approach this as a regular site visitor, log out of your Drupal site. Or, if you’re smart like me, just fire up another web browser where you’re not logged on to the site (that way, you can still use the admin part of Drupal in your main browser and test the average user experience in the other).

Simply visit any blog post on the site (or any node that allows comments) and leave a comment on that post. Now, head on over to your email inbox and wait for that alert to arrive. Mine arrived in just a couple of minutes.

Developers Dries Buytaert and Benjamin Schrauwen have announced the release of an all new anti-comment spam system called Mollom. Since Dries is the mastermind behind the community-building CMS Drupal, Mollom seems to have a wider remit than you might find with comparable systems like Akismet.

They’re not just going after the usual automated comment spam that most anti-spam focuses on. Mollom allows you to look at the entire spectrum of user contributed content and analyse it against a number of factors: spam, offensive/inflammatory content, aggressive content, etc.

I’ve installed the Mollom module on my personal Drupal website and I’m thinking seriously about installing it on a couple of other Drupal sites that I’m working on that are getting hit heavily with user account spam*. There’s an option in the config page for Mollom that indicates it can watch out for spam user accounts, which will be a godsend for anyone who runs an open community.

What Does Mollom Protect?

Well, looking at the configuration page (in Drupal 6), you can protect all your contact and comment forms, user registration and password request forms and input forms for any node type, such as blogs, pages, polls and stories. That’s pretty cool and covers all the possible ways a user (or a spam-bot) might try to enter spam on your site.

Effectiveness?

It’s too early to say. Give it a couple of days and we’ll see. My personal blog isn’t very heavily trafficked, so I may install it on another community site I’m working on to see how it handles user account and content spam.

Mollom works on three classifications: good content, bad content and content it is unsure of. When it’s unable to make a classification, Mollom will present a CAPTCHA box to the user to verify their input.

Getting Started With Mollom

There’s a fairly comprehensive post about Mollom over on Dries Buytaert’s blog that should get you up and running in no time. Unlike Akismet, which allows you to use the same key across multiple websites, Mollom requires you to create a key set for each website you plan to run it on.

It only takes a moment or two to get up and running, so visit the Mollom website for more information.

* User accounts that are created by software for the purposes of spamming.

The theory behind this is that you protect your site from linking to ‘bad neighbourhoods’ an possibly incurring penalties with Google for spammy links. Rel=”nofollow” is your way of saying – as the site owner – that you can’t vouch for the quality of those links.

Anyway, you probably already know the reasoning – let’s show you how to set this up.

Configuring Nofollow On Input Filters

Yes, that’s right. The “nofollow” attribute is configured on Input filters. Go to your Drupal administration pages and browse to Site Configuration -> Input Formats.

Normally you want the default Input Format set to Filtered HTML for user-generated content. This allows your users the ability to use HTML formatting without having access to insert scripts or other disruptive things on the site.

1. Click on the configure button for Filtered HTML. You’ll see under the Filters heading that a number of filters are activated. If the HTML Filter isn’t activated, then activate it and save your changes.
2. Click the Configure button at the top of the page and you’ll see how the filter is currently configured.
3. Activate the option for Spam link deterrent and save the settings. All outgoing links will now have rel=”nofollow” applied to them.

Refining With Access Permissions

If you want to be especially clever about it, you could modify permissions so that regular members and anonymous users get the Filtered HTML input by default but set your ‘trusted members‘ up with access to a less restrictive Input Format such as Full HTML.

But that’s a conversation for another day, folks…

Basically, in contrast to previous editions of Drupal, comments are now configured by content type – allowing you to permit comments on blog entries, but not on image nodes.

Finding The Configuration Pages

To find the configuration page for each content type, browse to Admin -> Content Management -> Content Types and click Edit on the content type you want to set up comments on.

My reason for wanting to configure comments was to allow comments on my blog and image content types (on my personal blog), and to allow people to enter contact information. I’m also testing Drupal’s new anti-spam system called Mollom, which seems to be similar in concept to Akismet, the anti-blog spam system from Automattic.

If you want some pointers on how to set up comment configuration there are some good comments and discussions over on Lullabot.

Here are some notes on configuring the Contact Form module for Drupal:

Activate The Module!

That’s right, browse to Administer / Site Building / Modules in your site and activate the Contact module. Save the configuration and you’re ready to go.

Configure The Contact Form

Browse to Administer / Site Building / Contact Form to begin. Click the link at the top of the page to Add Category.

• Give the category a name. I’ve used “Contact Site” (where site is the name of the website).
• Configure recipients. You can put in a single email address here, or multiple addresses separated with a comma. I’m using info@domain.com.
• If you like, you can configure a polite autoresponder to send an acknowledgement back to the visitor.
• Take note of the weight setting – if you have more than one category in your contact form, you’ll have to set the weight so that the fields are ordered in the right manner.
• Since we have only one category, we’ll ignore the Selected setting for now.

When you’re done configuring, click Submit to create the contact form category.

This basic setup with give you a form with fields for name, email address, subject and message. There’s also a check box that allows the sender to receive a copy of the message.

Configuring Contact Form Settings

You can customize the contact form message text by browsing to Administer / Site Building / Contact Form / Settings. This page also allows you to set maximum messages per hour – an anti-spam setting that prevents you getting bombarded with contact form spam!

You can also allow members to have a personal contact form which relays emails to the address they have in their profile.

Integrating Into Site Navigation

When you activate the Contact Form module, a menu item gets created for the page (which points to yoursite.com/contact. This item is disabled by default, so you have to enable it and move it to the desired place in your navigation.

To do this, browse to Administer / Site Building / Menus. Find the Contact Form link and click the enable button. The edit form should appear.

You can change the title of the contact form if desired, but the important items are the Parent Item field and the Weight. Set these according to your navigation structure and you should notice the link appearing when you refresh the page. You might have to fiddle with the weight of the item to get it in the right position.

Testing The Form

You’re nearly finished. Just don’t forget to test the form by sending a quick message through it!

[tags]Drupal, Tips, Web Design[/tags]

Providing a sitemap to the search engines basically gives them an inventory of the pages in your site. It’s useful in helping them to find and index older and possibly orphaned content in your website that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to find.

Basic XML Sitemap Setup

• First, download the Google Sitemap module for Drupal. Upload the gsitemap folder to your Drupal installation into sites/all/modules. If the modules folder doesn’t exist, you may need to create it.
• Once you’ve uploaded the module, go to Administer | Site Building | Modules, and activate the module labelled XML Sitemap.
• Now, you’ll need to configure the module. Got to Administer | Site Configuration | XML Sitemap and set the options accordingly. By default, the “Submit To Google” option is selected, but you might also want to automatically submit to Yahoo! and Ask. In fact, I recommend it. You should also select to submit sitemap when the site is updated and when cron is run. Cron tasks in Drupal automatically perform regular maintenance on your Drupal installation. It’s recommended to set this up. (I may cover this in a later article)

Problems I Encountered During Sitemap Configuration

After following those ‘default’ steps to setup, I attempted to access my sitemap. No luck, it gave a parse error in FireFox. Upon further investigation, the file was empty. So the sitemap hadn’t been generated. If you encounter this problem, try these steps:

• Browse to Administer | Site Configuration | File System.
• In the Temporary Directory box, remove the forward-slash character from the start of /tmp. Save the new settings. You should see a notice that “The directory tmp has been created”
• Try to access your sitemap file again (should be at http://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml). This time you should see the sitemap that has been generated.
• Now that the sitemap has been created, you can force a cron run to ping Google, Yahoo! and Ask. Simply visit Administer | Logs | Status Reports and click the link that says “run cron manually”. Follow this up by viewing the Recent Log Entries Report where you should see a number of entries confirming submission to the various search engines.

For bonus points, you could (and should) configure your robots.txt file for sitemap autodiscovery.

In most of the standard Drupal themes, the Preview, Publish and Delete buttons are styled in the same way, which gives equal visual weight to each button. Arguably the most dangerous would be to mistakenly click on the Delete button and wipe out a draft post!

This simple tutorial shows how to style the three buttons so that the Publish button is most prominent, Preview is next and the Delete button is displayed almost as an inline link. Excellent notion, slightly marred in that the solution isn’t particularly accessible for those with poor or no vision (I think the guidelines say that you shouldn’t use color to provide meaning).