As you work more and more with Drupal, you will likely begin to formulate a list of modules that you feel are most useful to you and want to include them in each site that you create. There may be as many opinions on which ones are the most indispensible as there are Drupal builders but these are my current can't-live-without choices. In basketball terminology, here are my starting 5:

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Now that you have set up your AMP configuration, a fresh database, and your Drupal file structure on your localhost, let’s get to creating a website.

In order for a website to be visible on the internet, it must be hosted. Whether you know it or not, you have a host right under your nose. On your own machine, you can set up what is called a localhost and create a website that resides on your hard drive. In order to make this happen, you will need 3 parts: Apache, which is a web server; MySQL, a database management system; and PHP, the language needed to build dynamic websites. Hence, you have the acronym AMP. Thankfully, there are applications that integrate all of these together so they can be downloaded all at once.

If you think of your Drupal website as a car, you know that the exterior is the part you can see. But you know that it has be powered some way but you don't see that from the outside. You have to actually raise the hood and look underneath to see the machinery that makes it go.

One thing I noticed right away when I became involved with Drupal was that I was seldom part of any discussion about it without somebody talking about one module or another. Modules are at the heart of Drupal. Think of a module as a self-contained unit of source code. Referring back to the puzzle illustration in post #1 of this series, each chunk of the puzzle, containing multiple pieces and already pre-assembled, represents a module.

In preparation for each new NFL season, every team strives to sign players who are some combination of bigger, stronger, and faster than those who are currently on their roster. A similar quest is continuously taking place among those groups who attempt to provide systems for creating websites. A content management system called Drupal, which is now on version 7, is the tool that is leading the way in all of these areas.

Sorry about being a little late but I have been swamped for the past several days. I will try to be more prompt in the future. In this posting I am going to talk about JavaScript objects.

For those of you who have not done any programming an object is a way of combing data, called properties, with the actions that affect that data, called methods. There is a set of special methods that reacts to external actions called events. Events may be standard events like click or a custom event you define. This may seem a little abstract so let's provide a more concrete example. Let's use a person. A person has physical characteristics like hair color, eye color, height, etc. these are the properties. People can also do things like walk, eat, drink, etc. these are the methods. An external event may be a tickle. So when the tickled event fires then execute the person's laugh method. This is the basic idea of object programming.

I have, and for the next several postings will be discussing JavaScript. Drupal makes extensive use of this language. Drupal even includes a tightly coupled JavaScript library of its own called drupal.js, this aside from the more general jQuery library. I am going someplace in this series so keep on coming. I think you will find the end result interesting. So let's get on with the next in this series.

JavaScript is a strange language in many ways but I thought I would focus on the particularities of JavaScript's logical operators || (or) and && (and). If you are coming from most other languages you are expecting these operators to return a boolean (true, false) value. In JavaScript this is not the case.

In branching (if statements) and iteration (looping statements like while) it is important to understand how these statements determine whether to branch or continue the loop. This subject concerns both of Drupal's primary programming languages, PHP and JavaScript. What is interesting is that this is not necessarily a boolean(true, false) evaluation. The two states are more accurately called truthy and falsey.

JavaScript is gaining increasing importance in web development today. This is for several reasons. First, it is the only client scripting language that has been implemented in one form or another across all of the major browsers. It can be used to provide animation, manipulate your HTML, change your CSS, and send communications to the browser without form submission. As discussed in my previous posting, JavaScript is important in Drupal as well. For the next several postings I will be talking about JavaScript so it may be useful for you to know at least a basic method of attaching JavaScript to your site.