Drupal - Interview Questions

Drupal is a free and open source Content Management System (CMS) that allows organizing, managing and publishing your content.

Drupal is very powerful and can be used for building large, complex sites. It is PHP based template and allows non-technical users to add and edit the content without any HTML or Web design knowledge. Using Drupal CMS, it can be easy to interact with other sites or technologies and can handle complex forms and workflows. It is available with more than 16000 modules which can be addressed with Drupal core and add-on modules.

The Features of Drupal are:

• It makes easy to create and manage your site.

• Translates anything in the system with built-in user interfaces.

It connects your website to other sites and services using feeds, search engine connection capabilities etc.

• Drupal is open source software hence requires no licensing costs.

• It designs highly flexible, creative website to the users and display more effectively to increase the visitors.

• Drupal can publish your content on social media such as Twitter, Facebook and other social mediums.

The disadvantage of Drupal are:

• Drupal is not user friendly interface. It requires advanced knowledge and few basic things about the platform to install and modify.

• Drupal is new content management system. It is not compatible with other software.

• Performance is low compared to other CMS's. The website which is built using Drupal will generate big server loads and never opens with a slow internet connection.

Menus are very important to navigate your website easily. Menus offer a set of links as a result; you can navigate your website. The Drupal menu allows you to add, remove and rename the menus and menu items.

If it is consist of sub-menus. Then it will be displayed under parent menu item.

It Sets the order of menu items.

Blocks are container objects that are used to organize your content of your website.

It is used to set width of first sidebar and second sidebar and unit in % or px or em.

Media query defines different style rules for different media devices and by default for this layout will be 1025px.

Media query for Landscape tablet will be min-width: 769px and max-width: 1024px.

It fixes your page at top of lists on your site.

Here you can specify alternative URL by which content can be accessed. Don't add slash at the end or beginning of the URL alias or else it will not work.

It allows you to publish your blog content on Front Page or you can stick at top of lists as per the demand.

By clicking on Provide a menu link checkbox it shows all the related details of Menu such as Menu link title, Description, Parent item, andWeight.

Provide revised information if any changes are made in the article.

By selecting open or close, it allows others to write comment for the article.

Specifies the authored name and the date when article has been authored.

Drupal content type defines the style in which contents are collected and displayed.

The status of the content present while filtering the pages are:

• Published

• promoted

• not promoted

• sticky

• not sticky

Menu Management is the important part to navigate through your Drupal admin page.

It displays the list of articles or pages which are created. It is a first screen that will get displayed when you log into administration area.

In this menu you can create, manage and find new pages. Here, the table gets displayed with the detail of the article i.e. status, title, updated, author and operation (Edit and delete).

Structure includes the blocks, manage content types, add new menu links to the site and manage administrative tagging of content.

In this menu, the lists of themes are displayed. User can install the theme, update the existing theme or switch the themes.

In people menu, you can create a new user account or mange the existing user.

This is an important part in the Drupal Back-End. Any changes done in this configuration, will affect the entire website. Here you can do the user account setting, site information setting or any other general site setting.

Taxonomy can be thought of classifying website content which display specific content based on taxonomy terms.

Drupal taxonomy is made up of several terms such as:

• Term: It is used to manage or describe the content.

• Vocabulary: It is set of terms.

User Management manages the information of the user, which allows creating or deleting the user, changing passwords, time and roles.

It allows user to access your website without asking them for the username or password.

It allows only those users to access your website, who are authenticated to use it.

The steps to optimize the Drupal site are:

• Enable Page Caching

• Compress CSS files

• Js Aggregation

• Moving Media Files and Static files to a CDN

• Optimize Images Size and Their Number

• Theme Optimization

Error Handling is a process of detection and finding the resolutions for the errors, this can be programming application errors or communicable errors.

Twitter Suffix will optionally append a Twitter handle, or text, so that you get pinged when someone shares an article.

Pane module is used to translate the custom panel's pane with optional title that will be stored as variables and it can be translate or edit quickly.

Aggregator Module takes the content from other websites but does not generate any feeds. It is also known as a feed reader. It gathers, displays texts and images and other sites and blogs.

Select the length of your descriptions.

Sends the automatic reply message to the user.

Unique identifier for the product is given here.

It is a percentage used to calculate the tax which is expressed as a decimal.

Specify what type of rounding should occur when tax rates of tax type are calculated for the unit price of a line item.

It includes the product line item types in add to cart form to collect information.

We should select the server from either of the one i.e. Production or Sandbox.

Invoice is a document with a statement of amount and cost, unique invoice number and tax information.

Order history is dependent on the ordered products made by the user through the use of checkout. It includes history of the product which includes order number, user name, order status etc.

It defines the order status such as processing or pending or completed or cancelled.

PHP 5.2+

The advantages of Drupal are:

• Drupal is a flexible CMS that allows handling content types including video, text, blog, menu handling, real-time statistics etc.

• It provides a number of templates for developing web applications. So there is no need to start from scratch if you are building simple or complicated web applications.

• Drupal is easy to manage or create blog or website. It helps to organize, structure, find and reuse content.

• Drupal provides some interesting themes and templates which gives your website an attractive look.

• Drupal has over 7000 plug-ins to boost your website. Since Drupal is an open source, you can create your own plug-ins.

Multilingual means your content can be written and will be displayed in different languages.