I’m not a web developer and that’s why I like the Drupal content management system so much. Drupal allows you to build Web sites (like this blog) that do things that you have no idea how to do unless you know how to code, which I don't.
Here’s a perfect example: I’m riding in a charity bike ride this summer and I thought it would be neat to allow people who donated to the cause to see exclusive content that other people couldn’t see.
The first step was figuring out how to set that up. My first plan was to put up a password, but for various reasons that wasn’t going to work. I did some searching at drupal.org and discovered a module called Taxonomy Access, which allows me to restrict access to categories by user role. I tested it out and it worked!
I didn’t want people to have to go through a lengthy registration process, so I looked for a module that would allow users to login with their Facaebook credentials. I found the Facebook Connect module and after a bit of tweaking the settings got it to work.
The only problem now was that I still had to manually assign the access role to the new users. There was no way to get an email when a new user registered using Facebook Connect, so I installed the Rules module and set up a triggered rule to send me an email whenever a new user creates an account.
When a user is registered, there was no way (besides me sending them a link) to find the exclusive content. So, I did some more digging and came across the “Menu Per Role” module. This handy little module allows you to create a navigation menu item that only members of a certain role can see.
Finally, I created an RSS feed using the Views module, so that people would know when there is new content.
From investigation to installation to testing, all of this took about an hour to do. That’s why I like Drupal.
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