Post installation

I'm new to Drupal and after experimenting for a few days, I've found myself needing some advice from the experts. I'm having trouble formulating my questions for the Drupal community, much less figuring out how to implement my ideas into a Drupal-run site. So, keeping that in mind, please bare with me.

Here goes ...

I want to run a school district website using a CMS. So far, it seems Drupal will be able to do what I want, yet I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around some concepts. Let me start with my needs ...

Different website sections available from the front page via a menu. Sections would be "District", "Schools", "Programs". etc. The sections may have subsections, for instance, "Schools" would list all the schools in the district and "Programs" would list different programs like "Gifted Education" and "Technology". Each of these subsections would have a separate manager ... the person who maintains the posts and menu items specific for their section. Each subsection would also have different contributors based on who they are (see users description below).

Users of the site would be Staff members, Students, Parents, Alumni, Community, and Other. Staff members also have sub-user categories of Teachers and Other Staff. Teachers, upon approval by admin after registering, will receive their own little space on the site that connects to the school or schools in which they teach. Within their space, they can post information about themselves, their classes, and conduct online courses to which Student users can subscribe (pending approval of the teacher) and contribute.

Hi,

I've been playing around with Drupal for a while, but I can't quite figure out how to put together the site that I want. I've started several times with lots of different modules, but I've never gotten it to work the way I wanted it, so I finally broke down and decided to cry for help. Help!

Here's what I want: I need to make a website for an association that is made up of several sections. The website should have a series of common static pages that explain things like what the association is all about, etc. For that I'm using the Page module. I also want to publish news items, I'll use Story.

Each of the sections that make up the association will get their own little corner of the site, where they can publish news items and keep a wiki-style repository of local information. For that last bit I was using the Book module, although it's not really very well suited.

The thing that screws me up every time is the access controls that I want. Each section will have one or more coordinators who should be able to contribute to the content of their section, and their section only. However, whatever they contribute must be aproved by one of the editors, which are common to all the sections. Any coordinator should be able to edit all content from their section (even if they weren't the original author), but all edits must be reviewed by one of the editors.

For this I was using taxonomy_access, but I have to grant administer nodes to the coordinator role (otherwise each coordinator can only edit his own submissions), which means that they can publish anything without editorial review.

First attempt to install a module. It went smoothly, except for an error saying that "variables" doesn't exist, i.e. this command from webform.mysql didn't work:

-- Setting default variables
INSERT INTO variable VALUES ('webform_version', 'a:2:{s:4:"text";s:5:"4.6.2";s:5:"build";i:462;}');

Probably should have prefixed 'webform_version' to match the Db name.

I've looked over the previous posts but cannot find any solution/answer on point. I'm creating a custom menu. One of the items is Add Content. I'd like to find a way to not show this item to a user who cannot create any content.

For example, the Logout item only appears to a user who is logged in (obviously, since a user who isn't logged in cannot logout). How can I get other menu items to behave like that?

Thanks!

I get the feeling this is not a new question, but I was looking for an updated answer.

I just got into Drupal and I just noticed that there is a big gaping hole when it comes to input validation. Simple things like phone number validation, email validation, zip code validation, custom input error messages, and many other nice input validation features seem to be missing. I would think that for a CMS framework user input validation would be an important issue. I of coarse realize that there is not one universal input validation solution for everything, but getting away from roll your own everything for the basics every single time is the whole reason I wanted to get into a framework in the first place.

I have few questions:

1. Is input validation built in? Is it some super cool feature that I is right in front of my face that I can't see? If so could someone show me where to get started with it?
2. How could this be something that has been overlooked by a CMS framework?
3. How are people doing this with Drupal?
4. Is there a prefab solution (module) that can help with input validation?
5. Is there a sexy AJAX solution out there, or will one be coming out soon?
6. Is there a group of developers working on a module for this? If so, I can help out. I am not so good with the existing Drupal API or the hooks but I am good with my JavaScript, PHP, and RegEx knowledge.

If someone could help me out, I sure would appreciate it.

We just upgraded from 4.6 to 4.7. For some reason we've lost teaser node titles. Blogs, stories, pages, no titles. Titles appear once I click "read more," but it's looking pretty funny on the titleless pages of teasers.

Might be a no-brainer, but I appreciate any help :P

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