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.

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]

For me however, the most useful feature of the plugin highlights links that have had rel=”nofollow” applied to them. This can be useful when doing link building campaigns. For instance, take a look at del.icio.us and StumbleUpon – both universally apply nofollow to all links except internal ones. There’s no PageRank value in those types of links, although there may be a short term traffic boost from submitting your site to them.

If you use SEO For FireFox, you’ll be stunned at the number of sites that apply nofollow on outgoing links. Naturally, blog comments are mostly nofollowed, but sites like YouTube also apply nofollow.

Changing the highlighter color – can be done by going to Tools, Options in Firefox and clicking the Options button on the SEO For Firefox entry. The default red is quite shocking when you see it splashed across a page, but it makes text unreadable.

I prefer to switch it to a lighter color for better legibility. When you update the options, the new highlighted color is applied upon the next page refresh.

The only drawback? I couldn’t get Writer working with Ultimate Tag Warrior. Until this evening…

Pascal VanHecke posted an excellent solution to add a custom tag provider to Live Writer’s built-in tag support.

Although he linked to some pre-setup information, you could miss this easily. I wanted to highlight that here.

If you’ve got a recent installation of WordPress with Ultimate Tag Warrior installed, log in to the Admin area and browse to Options, Tags and look for the option that reads Embedded Tags. Tick that box and save your settings. (The option to automatically generate META Keywords looks interesting too – might want to switch that on as well)

So, set this up in advance, follow Pascal’s instructions (and helpful graphics) and get blogging with Windows Live Writer!

Possibly the greatest of these is the Bookmarks Toolbar which gets added to the browser. You can use the toolbar to display bookmarks three ways:

1. Imported toolbar items: When you install the plugin originally, del.icio.us bookmarks any items you had on the toolbar and tags them firefox:toolbar.
2. Bookmarks by tag: My personal favourite – this allows you to select favourite tags and creates a menu out of each tag.
3. Bookmarks by bundle: del.icio.us allows you to create groups of tags – this view lists each bundle as a top-level menu and individual tag names as submenus.

Creating Your Toolkit From Tags

The key to displaying your most used websites is to group them into useful sets of tags. For example, I might visit my Gmail account, my RSS reader, stats packages, Google calendar on a daily basis. So, I’ll bookmark all of these pages and tag them quicklinks.

Now, to get that tag to appear as a drop-down menu, click the del.icio.us log on the toolbar and select Manage favourite tags. Type the name of the tag into the box and click add. It will appear in your list of favourite tags, where you can choose to have the bookmarks appear in alphabetical or chronological order.

Other Power Tag Ideas

I’ve got a couple of ideas for tag groups that could really work (including some I use myself).

• Bookmarklets
• Advertising and affiliate tracking: Store all your advertising and affiliate sites under one handy tag.
• Web stats/analytics packages
• Your favourite social networking sites.
• Your favourite news/blog resources. RSS readers, aggregators, news websites. All in one place.

You’ve probably got other ideas for how this could be used. If so, share them in the links below.

Using Your Tag Toolbar

The beauty of the toolbar is that with one click you can open all bookmarks under a given tag across multiple tabs in FireFox. So, if you’ve grouped your bookmarks correctly, you can save a whole lot of time just opening up various websites!

Simply right-click on the tag name and choose the option “Open In Tabs”.

Bookmarklets and Privacy in del.icio.us Toolbar

When I first installed the Bookmarks extension, all my social networking bookmarklets disappeared. I was a bit disherartened about this, but the good news is del.icio.us Bookmarks has support for Bookmarklets.

Where you would normally drag a bookmarklet to the toolbar, just right-click the link in your browser window and select “Bookmark this page in del.icio.us”. I use a “bookmarklets” tag to organise these and have it appear on my toolbar for easy access.

When you’re bookmarking blocks of JavaScript like bookmarklets, you’ll notice that these are not shared with other del.icio.us users. This is for security. Similarly, when you bookmark something you want to keep private, make sure you opt to NOT share it!

Anyway, for the past couple of months, I’ve been using the del.icio.us Bookmarks extension for FireFox. It’s an add-on that completely replaces the FireFox bookmarks system with your del.icio.us bookmarks, creating seamless integration between del.icio.us and FireFox.

Previous plugins have allowed you to easily bookmark and capture new pages. The Bookmarks extension allows you to quickly and easily search your bookmarks without having to visit the del.icio.us website.

The del.icio.us toolbar

The del.icio.us toolbar is a useful addition. You can use it to show recently bookmarked items, but you can also use it to display collections of bookmarks by tag or by bundle. This can be really useful as a toolkit of frequently used websites.

Sidebar Functionality

You can view your bookmarks in a sidebar. Even better, you can edit any bookmark by right-clicking on it and choosing properties. By right-clicking on a tag name, you have the option to open all the bookmarks under that tag in multiple FireFox tabs.

Extended Properties

Because of the deeper integration with FireFox, you can also assign keyword shortcuts for particular pages. For example, give the Gmail homepage a shortcut name of gmail and from now on, simply type gmail into the location bar and press return. The shortcut gmail gets automatically translated into https://mail.google.com/.

I’ve written about FireFox shortcuts in the past – check out this short tutorial.

I thought I’d share some of my post-install tips. Some of them are necessary and others are purely my personal preference, but hopefully you’ll find them useful:

• Change the default admin password. The default WordPress password is very difficult to remember, so make it something you’ll be more comfortable with.
• Fill out your profile. I recommend you fill out your first and last names, and website address if it’s different to your blog address. You can use these parameters in your WordPress theme to display your name and website alongside posts written by you.
• Set the tagline for the blog. The default tagline reads “Just another WordPress weblog”. Not very professional. You can change this in Options / General. From an SEO perspective, make sure your tagline includes relevant keywords, as these will be included in blog search engines like Technorati.
• Clear the default blogroll. Much as I like and respect the WordPress developers, their links don’t belong on every blogroll! Click on the Blogroll menu (used to be called Links in previous versions) and delete the entries in there. Feel free to replace with a list of friends/family/colleagues…
• Delete the “Hello World” post. WordPress starts you off with one post and a comment from Mr WordPress. You should delete these straight away and consider replacing with your own introductory post saying who you are and what the blog’s about.
• Edit the About page. WordPress automatically creates an About page for your blog. It’s recommended that you fill this in, because it provides basic information to your readers about the topic of your blog.
• Configure discussion options. This controls whether blog comments are left automatically or if they’re held for review. The default settings are pretty good, but you can enforce stricter rules by selecting “An administrator must always approve the comment”. You can also add watchwords to the comment moderation area so that comments with certain words are automatically held for moderation.
• Configure Permalinks. WordPress handles URL naming automatically so you don’t have to. Basically, you decide the format for your URLs, set it and forget it. Permalink formats are a hot topic, and subject of much debate. My preferred format at the moment is /%post_id%/%postname%/ which gives the post number and then the title (obviously). Some people are taking it a step further and just having yourdomain.com/%postname%/ which is even cleaner.
• Create Categories. This is an important step, as your categories will help organise your content for years to come. Choose appropriate category names, do some keyword research to identify popular terms – even your category names can help with SEO!

These are some of the basic post-install procedures I use for WordPress. Once you’ve got these things out of the way, you’ll want to focus on customising your WordPress theme and installing plugins to give your blog extra functionality. I don’t think it’s fair to recommend a standard set of plugins, as these will vary according to your blogging needs.

Of course, I have my own stock of standard plugins that I use for most WP installs. I’ll share those in a future post.

If you want more information on post-installation tips for WordPress, Download Squad has a more in-depth list. I think some of their steps are unnecessary, or are decisions to be taken when theming the blog. What I’ve included here are the basic post-install tips for WordPress. Enjoy!

Now, I’m not normally one to upgrade every time a new version of WordPress is released, especially a minor point version. But the WP developers seemed concerned enough to cross post this on all their blogs, so I decided it might actually be necessary. A tiny bit irritating, as I’d just upgraded virtually everything to WordPress 2.1.1, but what can you do?

Anyway, I was very pleased to stumble across Ajay’s neat instructions on how to upgrade WordPress via SSH shell. I’ve done a couple of upgrades now and neither have taken any more than 5 minutes each. My previous process was to download the latest version, unzip it into my Dreamweaver site and upload the whole thing again. This could be pretty time intensive, as you can imagine.

I did spend a lot of time trying to get SSH to work, on sites hosted on both Media Temple and Dreamhost (aff). If you’re new to SSH like I am, let me save you a lot of time: Most hosts don’t enable SSH be default, you’ve got to enable it yourself. In Dreamhost, you enable it through the user management on the panel. In Media Temple, it depends on what package you have, so check their knowledge base.

Anyway, do take the time to learn Ajay’s SSH technique – it’ll save you hours in the long run and it’s such an elegant solution to managing WordPress. Of course, someone has to mention SVN at this point…..