RE: [BW] Page layout with Drupal 7

  • From: "Homme, James" <james.homme@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2011 13:51:02 -0500

Hi Jamal,
I'll start watching the accessibility group over on drupal.org myself, but I 
wanted to post what I think are the answers to some of your questions based on 
the Drupal 6 themes I've played with to this point. Most of this is based on 
the default theme and what I've learned from reading various Drupal books and 
posts on Drupal.org. My answers are interspersed with your questions.

Q. Conceptually, what are  the distinct purposes of different menus, e.g., the 
main menu and
navigation menus Since the main menu and other menus can include
aspects that seem related to navigation to me, I do not understand what
is supposed to be different about the navigation menu, main menu, or
other menus.

A.  This is what the Menus administration area says about the default Drupal 
menus and their use.

Navigation

The navigation menu is provided by Drupal and is the main interactive menu for 
any site. It is usually the only menu that contains personalized links for
authenticated users, and is often not even visible to anonymous users.

Jim's comment: This really should say users who have the anonymous role. In 
Drupal, usually the way you make a site that can have members and non-members 
is to give members the role called Authenticated user.

Jim's comment: When someone gets the role of authenticated user, this menu 
appears. This menu appears because often a user who has the roll called 
authenticated user is given permission to view content that they can navigate 
to when they click on one of the links in this menu. By default, roles are tied 
to which content types a given user can view. Be careful, though, because if 
you check the box that says Access Content, you lock a role out from viewing 
all content types. This is because all content types are based on something 
called a node. That's a subject for another e-mail. OK. Back to the regularly 
scheduled program.

Primary links
Primary links are often used at the theme layer to show the major sections of a 
site. A typical representation for primary links would be tabs along the top.

Secondary links
Secondary links are often used for pages like legal notices, contact details, 
and other secondary navigation items that play a lesser role than primary links

Jim's comment: This is all based on conventions. Drupal doesn't lock you into 
anything. The convention seems to be that you have a menu called <primary 
links>. That goes in the block called header region. The second thing you have 
is <Navigation>. This goes in the block called left region. There's also 
something called <Secondary links>. By default, with the default theme, this is 
set to go into the block called <none> in the blocks administration area.
In a Drupal site, if you navigate to one of the pages by clicking a main 
navigation link, if that page links another level down, links to those pages 
get added to the left region.

This convention mirrors the common usability convention of web sites which has 
a three tier structure in which the home page is tier one, main pages are tier 
2, and content that covers sub topics of main pages are tier 3.

Then, we have that other set of links in a block if we need them. We could use 
them to put links in the footer block or the right region.

Keep in mind, that Drupal lets you do any old thing you want to. You could 
totally mess up your site layout. This is all convention.

So, in summary, we have this.

* We have a menu administration page, where we configure everything about menu 
behavior except where the menus appear on screen.

* We have a Block administration page where we configure where everything 
appears on screen including menus.

I didn't talk about what makes navigation work yet, because I didn't mention 
how to control where pages show up. I'll talk about that briefly now.

When you click on Create Content, and get into the form, by default, whatever 
you type as the contents of the Title field ends up as the content of that 
page's link in whatever menu it shows up in. Below the body field is a link 
called Menu Settings. If you type something different in the edit field that 
shows up below that link, that text will become the content of the link in the 
menu. This means that you can have page titles that have different text than 
the menu links you click on. I don't like this, personally, but you can do it.

Please tell me if this helps or not. If not, I'll try to clarify.

Jim

From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
[mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of E.J. Zufelt
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 8:31 AM
To: blindwebbers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: programmingblind
Subject: Re: [BW] Page layout with Drupal 7

Good morning Jamal,

I'd like to encourage you to post these questions, particularly about layout 
and Core themes, to 
groups.drupal.org/accessibility<http://groups.drupal.org/accessibility> .  I am 
certain that someone will provide a pretty quick response, and then we will 
have a record that this type of information is necessary to make our ecosystem 
more accessible to visually impaired developers.

Should you have problems with signing up or posting please let me know.

Thanks,
Everett Zufelt
http://zufelt.ca

Follow me on Twitter
http://twitter.com/ezufelt

View my LinkedIn Profile
http://www.linkedin.com/in/ezufelt



On 2011-03-09, at 8:10 AM, Jamal Mazrui wrote:




I am learning Drupal 7 partly by building a site. Core or contributed
modules often create blocks of information that need to be assigned to a
region of the page in order to become visible to vistors. One problem I
am encountering is deciding what regions to use for blocks that are not
automatically assigned to a region. Right now, I am just using the
default Drupal 7 theme. Can anyone give tips on where to place things?
Are there conventions, or usability factors to consider, depending on
the nature of the block? Are there guidelines for when a block should
only appear on the front page, or be associated only with a particular
content type?

Other layout-related questions are as follows? Conceptually, what are
the distinct purposes of different menus, e.g., the main menu and
navigation menus Since the main menu and other menus can include
aspects that seem related to navigation to me, I do not understand what
is supposed to be different about the navigation menu, main menu, or
other menus.

I am also curious if anyone has tips on using the views and panels
modules with a screen reader. Are there canned layouts that are easy to
implement? If so, where should I start? Is panels really necessary for
a site that is not highly sophisticated?

I think content management systems like Drupal, WordPress, and Jumla!
hold much potential for blind web developers because they can
automatically handle a lot of the layout decisions. If we can only
master the mechanisms for creating layouts with the available designers,
we can go a long way toward developing visually acceptable and highly
functional sites.

Feel free to point me to web articles that explain some of this in a
conceptual rather than visual manner. I have done a lot of web
searching and reading of Drupal books, but am always open to learning of
other resources online.

Jamal
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