Blog 6

Blog 6

1.    What is the purpose of security permissions in a CMS? What are the various permission options provided in Drupal?

Security systems allows a developer to control the access of certain user/groups permissions that can restrict the user/group access to certain content and/or part of the CMS website. Control over user/group permissions/access is critically important, because as a developer, you may not want certain users being able to access a particular content or area of the website.

Drupal implements the following attributes for security permission: -

Anonymous user – Anyone can access the content of website including people that are not signed in.

Authenticated user – Only registered user can access the content of website.

Administrator – Only the website admin can access the whole website controls and permissions.

Figure 1 Image of the Drupal security permission types

2.    What is a “theme” in Drupal? How do themes make designing web sites easier?

A theme is a customized website template designed and built for webpages. A theme consist of a range of things like font types, font size, color scheme for the theme, and other areas that aesthetics of your site.  A theme plays a vital role in improving visitor’s experience. A theme in Drupal simply means how a administrator wants it website to look like.

In Drupal, themes can be downloaded, and installed on Drupal CMS.

Benefits of using themes: -

1)    Consistent look and feel throughout the website.

2)    Administrator do not have to build the website template from scratch.

3)    Easy to install.

4)    Large numbers of themes available for free download.

5)    Themes are easily customizable according to personal requirements.

6)    Watch the YouTube video to get more information about themes usage benefits - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO0ByurK_3I

3.    What are “blocks” in Drupal? How do blocks make designing web sites easier?

Blocks are boxes that can be placed in different areas of website. They are very similar to the HTML tag <div> that acts as a container for objects like images, paragraph, slideshow, or even videos.  Blocks are very helpful in Drupal, because they allow you to simply move content wherever you want.  This is far more convenient than editing the source code of your webpage to adjust content locations.

Figure 2 Sample blocks alignment in Drupal

4.    What is a Google Ajax Wizard? How can Google Ajax Wizards make adding content to a web site easier?

Google Ajax Wizard is essentially a feed that can dynamically pull content from other website or server. This makes adding content to a website easier, Google Ajax Wizard will dynamically pull content for you and saves you time from having to add it by yourself.

From October 2015, Google Ajax became deprecated.

Figure 3 Google Ajax Crawling Deprecated.