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In this lesson, I’ll show you how to build a classifieds board in Drupal using the Views module and its exposed filters.
This is the first part of the tutorial, where we’ll create a real estate classifieds board. Later on, I plan to build a vehicle classifieds board with all sorts of advanced features. If you'd like to see a lesson on a specific type of classifieds board, write to me on the forum — I’ll try to make a lesson for it. For now, enjoy my tutorials and feel free to connect with me on social media.

One essential feature of our Drupal classifieds board will be the automatic unpublishing of listings after a certain period. We'll start by using ready-made modules, and later we'll try implementing this functionality with the Rules module. For this, I found 2 modules for Drupal 6 and 1 for Drupal 7:

January 26, 2019 – 10:00 – 14:00 (MSK)
January 27, 2019 – 10:00 – 14:00 (MSK)

Hello everyone! My name is Ivan, I’m a Drupal developer, and I run a blog and YouTube channel about Drupal:
https://drupalbook.org
https://www.youtube.com/c/IvanAbramenko

Drupal: Pushing the Limits

Drupal is one of the best content management systems (CMS). In fact, it won the 2008 Best Open Source CMS and Best PHP Open Source CMS awards—twice! After about 8 years of development, Drupal has become one of the most powerful and versatile frameworks available. Its incredible flexibility is both its greatest strength... and its greatest weakness. Any functionality is possible—but where do you start? I’ve spent long days exploring various modules, their use cases, compatibility, bugs, and quirks, to confidently recommend what works.

In this lesson, I will preconfigure Drupal for a social network. I will install the following modules:

Profile Page in Drupal

The profile page is the most complex and exciting part of any social network. I hope this will also be an engaging experience for you after reading this article. Drupal offers us several options for implementing user profiles. The first option available as a core module is the Profile module. This module is suitable if you want a very simple profile. But we're talking about a social network.

In this section of the tutorial, I will demonstrate that Drupal is not just a CMS. We will explore what Drupal modules consist of, and we’ll also create a few of our own modules.

With the transition to Drupal 7, we move to the new Drupal DB abstraction layer API, which is built on top of PDO. PDO has long been used in frameworks like Zend, as well as many other PHP frameworks. But everything seemed so convenient in Drupal 6 with writing plain SQL queries — so why do we need something new?

Let’s first understand what PDO is.

If you’ve written modules for Drupal 6, switching to the new Drupal 7 Database API won’t be too difficult. The new DB API is based on the PHP PDO extension, which gives it the ability to work with various databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, and potentially Oracle. Whether it’s easier to use is subjective — getting used to the new syntax takes time, and writing SQL queries is still more familiar for many developers.

Here’s a brief excerpt from the official documentation:

The primary mechanism for defining a database connection in Drupal is the $databases array in settings.php. As the name implies, $databases allows you to define multiple database connections. It also supports defining multiple targets. A connection is not opened (i.e., a connection object is not created) until a piece of code executes a database query for the first time.