Advice about Menus

Menus in Drupal can be a little weird. Even with Nice Menus installed, the menu system often seems inflexible, rigid. I have frequently been tempted to create all my own menu items with paths entered manually. But that would be a big mistake. One really important tip is always to let Drupal create a menu item for you (on just about everything that you think you may want to have on a menu one day) and then assign the item to a “holding” parent menu, where it is available but “out of the way”. That way you can always go back and assign it someplace relevant to its function. And, the system will keep up with the path in case it changes, like a view that you change the path on long after its creation.

Performance – Blocks Vs Panels

If you are curious about whether Blocks is better than Panels in terms of performance  then check out this post:

http://www.codeenigma.com/blog/performance-panels#comment-4855

This is great. It tests both components and gives the data in a nice, clinical summary. The long and short of it is that Blocks is SLOWER than Panels, especially if you are using Views. But check out the post for yourself.

Thanks to Greg Harvey for doing ALL the heavy lifting on this one!

Tip about Views with exposed operators in Panels

If you integrate a View with exposed filters (for user defined searches) into a Panel page, that View has to return something right off the bat just to show up in the Panel. And you can’t give it a header or a footer either. Completely weird. What i did was supply a keyword in the “body” filter – “sample”. The word sample returns exactly one result for me. That’s just the nature of my content. But this allows the View to show up and isn’t too ambiguous to the user as to what they should do next.

User Permissions

This is just another friendly reminder, for myself, mainly, to ALWAYS check the user permissions page as you add modules, content types and do general development of your site. There have been so many cases now where I find that a feature, or a combination of modules that comprises a functionality aren’t working properly because I don’t have the permissions set properly. Usually that the authenticated user role isn’t assigned whatever it is i am trying to do.

what this has led to is a search for a module that has the functionality that I think I need when all I really needed to was to set permissions. Just a part of the learning process!

Permissions

I just want to state that as you go through enabling and configuring modules and their features, make sure to check the permissions on the People page, Permissions section. Even for admin privs. There have been several times when I think that something isn’t working correctly but it turns out that a permission that I assume should be granted by enabling the mod isn’t.

So always check permissions.