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Welcome to GotDrupal.com!

Here’s the shortest answer to "What’s GotDrupal.com?" - A site with Drupal videos.

Yes, plain and simple as it is, it’s where I’m providing videos about the evolution and development of drupal sites, in particular, this site!

This site looks NOTHING like it will! - But that’s a good thing.

I will be producing videos on various topics from the basic module review to how to code your own module as I work on this site. The videos on this site simply document progression as the site is enhanced. You learn as I create!

Click the titles to view the videos

It’s not obvious yet (there are plans for making viewing videos cooler) but all you have to do is click the title link.

Twitter link and video notification

Some of my recent visitors wanted to be notified when new videos are released. You can always sign up for email notification or follow GotDrupal.com on Twitter

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Because of moving the GotDrupal.com web site to the Omega8.cc hosting platform, it became necessary for me to develop locally against the same server setup used on the deployment platform. This meant I needed to use Nginx for my local development of Drupal sites.

So, out goes the default Apache and the wonderfully easy MAMP and in comes a nice homebrew install of nginx.

Special thanks to my friend Brian Gilbert of http://realityloop.com/ for all his hard work on making Drupal easier to configure when working with nginx.

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• Beginner
• draft nodes
• save as draft

Drupal is a very powerful publishing system. In fact, it's pretty hard not to stumble across many modules which will help you create an awesomely powerful publishing platform. Drupal distribtions, such as Managing News, have already packaged a handful of modules which get you started right off the bat.

If your publishing needs are simple and straight forward, then you may just need a handful of uself modules.

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• Beginner
• drupal hosting

When most people consider Drupal hosting, they're looking for a reliable host they hope isn't going to shut down over night. It's typically your larger run-of-the-mill hosting provider running an install script that will simply load a basic Drupal install.

For myself, I've always opted to manage my own hosting. This meant taking care of setting up, securing and optimizing either a dedicated server box or the current trend of using a VPS (virtual private server) which uses virtualization technology to fully leverage all the resources of a really beefy server.

Recenly, however, while spending a fair amount of time becoming familiar with the Varnish reverse proxy server (which is very nice by the way), I decided I was spending too much time with my own "Drupal hosting". I wanted to create more videos and more valuable content - I enjoy doing it.

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• Beginner
• masquerade

Building a Drupal web site certainly can take a bit of time, especially when you've got a large number of users, roles and permissions. It's also very frustrating when users write in to say your web site is not working properly.

The Drupal Masquerade module is an excellent tool for testing all kinds of settings within your Drupal site. The module allows you to easily switch between any other user and limit this capability to a group of users covered by a certain role. The catch, however, is to be certain you know what is happening with each role and user who has access to the powerful module.

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• Beginner
• modules

I remember when I first started with Drupal. There was just a handful of modules compared to today. I want to say something like 600 or so...

In fact, there were few enough, I had printed the whole list of all top Drupal modules and took a stack of paper home to read about each one. Fast forward to today's module count and it's coming close to 6,000!

Can you say "Holy metric ton load of Drupal modules to search through Batman!" How do you really know which are good and which are bad?

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• drupal email
• Intermediate
• messaging module
• notifications module

Twitter's great. SMS messaging is great. Even Instant Messaging is great.

But, there's one thing which ties everyone together online. It's not going away soon, and it's something that pretty much everyone has. If you guessed email (the title of the article was a give away, wasn't it?), then you're absolutely right. Just try to imagine a world without email - even with killer audio/voice technology, it just wouldn't be as refined without email.

So, if you're seeking a solution to have Drupal email your users, then one of the best methods for doing this is the Messaging and Notifications modules. You won't find one specific Drupal email module on Drupal.org because sending email is already built into Drupal. It's they way, and when email, or any other message method is used, that you need to focus on.

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• Advanced
• embedded video
• flowplayer

Flash and its associated players are all the rage (actually have been for quite some time), except for with the iPad that is. Obviously, you can embed video into your Drupal site in a number of ways.

You can use an external site like YouTube or Blip.tv using the Embedded Media Field Module or you can implement video on your own site using the FLV Media Player Module in conjunction with JW Player.

I've already covered how you can use any of the possible flash players (JW Player or Flowplayer) in this video about SWFTools. So, what was next was Flowplayer and it's here that I've put together a video about using the Flowplayer API Module in conjunction with the respective, and required, Flowplayer flash player and javascript.

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• boost module
• Intermediate
• performance

It's no coincidence the title of this video corresponds with exactly what you're probably trying to do with your Drupal site. Squeeze every bit of performance you can from whatever server you're on. Shared hosting, dedicated box, virtual server, you name it. So how does the mere Drupal user or admin get stellar performance out of Drupal?

It turns out, the tried and true method for the fastest web page response is simply allowing the web server to spit back a simple html page - just like the good old days of Web 1.0.

Now, Drupal is a complex Content Management System with years of personal investment by many talented and enterprising minds. It has a feature rich database with many creative optimizations in place.

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• Beginner
• menu block
• menu trails
• menus
• nice menus

There's a mistake I've made which a few others have made too. The mistake is rushing into your new Drupal site and populating your menu right away.

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