A development copy of Drupal on your local computer lets you design and build a site with a few fewer hassles. It is an excellent place to do testing and code development, but does not support collaboration very well. For collaborating with stakeholders, you may want to have both a development site on your local computer and a test site on a regular internet connected web hosting solution (e.g. OIT Web Hosting or a departmentally run server).
If you run into a problem editing your Drupal website and need to get help from the community, please use the following guidelines to best share and explain the problem you have encountered.
This section describes some of the more advanced tasks you might need to accomplish when editing a Drupal-powered website.
If you are hosting a Drupal website on OIT Web Hosting, you can SSH into your host, but you cannot run the command-line tool Drush from your SSH session because OIT doesn't allow PHP to be run directly from the SSH command line of Web Hosting accounts. However, this doesn't mean that you cannot use Drush at all with OIT Web Hosting – you just have to work around this limitation.
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is an open protocol for sharing directory information and can be used as an alternative to CAS to allow users to log in to a web application using their GT Account Username and password. Unless your application doesn't support CAS, it's best to use it instead of LDAP, since LDAP requires obtaining a special GTED LDAP user account for your application.
Central Authentication Service (CAS) based single sign-on is the main method of doing authentication via GT Account Usernames for Drupal website logins. Once users have logged into the GT CAS system, the can access any Georgia Tech website that utilizes CAS without having to enter their GT Account Username again, as long as they don't completely close their browser or clear their browser's cookie cache.
There are a number of ways you can host your Drupal site on campus, which is strongly recommended for any unit-level website.
Roles are used by Drupal to apply a set of permissions to a group of user accounts. Some roles are built into Drupal, and some are automatically created by different Georgia Tech community modules and distributions, such as Drupal Express.
Automatically applies to anyone visiting your site who is not logged in.
The Update Manager, if used properly, can provide you an easily-accessible location to view what modules and themes need updating.
The settings for the Update Manager ( admin/reports/updates/settings ) provide a few key settings:
The sub topics below provide information on how to make use of images/photos and videos on your Drupal websites.
Of course, the first step to adding photos or videos is obtaining good quality content. While just about anyone can take high resolution pictures quickly and easily these days with a cell phone, you may wish to look through the Georgia Tech Digital Image Portal, which contains professional quality photographs for which Georgia Tech owns the copyright.
