Print-friendly version
Send to friendMore control
Controlling menus and breadcrumbs
Navigation can be a complex area of Drupal, but a few modules help clean up the rough edges:
- Menu Breadcrumb or Custom Breadcrumbs - set up your site’s breadcrumb navigation to match the hierarchy of your active menu, not just the default “Navigation” menu. Remember, you can enable/disable breadcrumbs entirely in your Fusion theme’s settings without needing a module
- Menu Block - show the top level of a menu in your header and the child items in the sidebar, or any other combination of menu levels
- Special Menu Items (Drupal 6 only) - allows you to have unlinked menu items, such as the parent item of a dropdown menu
Controlling Drupal author, date, taxonomy, and comment links
The following modules are recommended for Drupal 6 if you want to have more control over how author/date are shown on each content type, taxonomy terms, and the links such as “Add comment” are displayed on each node. Most of them have been incorporated into Drupal 7 core.
- Submitted By - hide or change the format of the author and/or date on nodes and comments
- Taxonomy Hide or Term Display - control which categories or tags are shown on different node types
- Theme Settings - customize the text and links for “Read more” and “Comments”/”Add comment” links, per content type (requires D6 patch)
Improving SEO
Search engine optimization is something we take seriously in Fusion. Our themes follow best practices and use clean, valid markup, optimized header code, and appropriate hierarchy of tags.
However, you’ll have the greatest impact on your site rankings with a bit more tuning of your site using the following modules:
- Page Title - great for SEO – optimize the page title for nodes
- Nodewords (Drupal 6) or Metatags (Drupal 7) - edit meta tags for your front page, nodes, and views
- Pathauto - automatically generate keyword-rich URLs for your content
- Global Redirect - prevent duplicate paths
- XML Sitemap - generate and submit sitemaps for search engines
Miscellaneous recommended Drupal modules
These modules don’t really fall into one of the other categories above, but come with the Fusion stamp-of-approval for improving your site!
- Print - add highly configurable printer-friendly versions of pages to your site
- Better Formats - control input filters (Filtered/Full HTML) for different node types and comments, also adjust the help text shown by the comment form
- Blocks404 (Drupal 6) or 404 Navigation (Drupal 7) - by default Drupal disables the display of menus and blocks on any 404 (page not found) error – this module will re-enable the display of your primary and secondary menus. Note that it will not display sidebar blocks in Fusion, because this only works for Drupal’s default themes and those which use $left and $right as region names (which Fusion does not)
Panels and Fusion
Fusion works great with the powerful Panels module for Drupal. Not only is this module a great tool for customizing and creating unique layouts for your site, but the “contexts” functionality allows you to create variations on pages and do things like override the “user profile” page or a certain content type.
Panels offers a drag and drop content manager that lets you visually design a layout and place content within that layout. Integration with other modules and Drupal content allows your content types and landing pages to use this, and even override system pages such as taxonomy and the node page so that you can customize the layout of your site with very fine grained permissions.
Our own site here uses Panels for one-off landing pages like the front page, What is Fusion?, and Get Fusion Free pages, as well as taking over the display of user profiles and product nodes.
Panels can be used for your entire site layout, but is currently most commonly used for customizing central page content.
How does Fusion help me if I want to use Panels?
At this point you are probably familiar with Fusion’s block styles, which allow you to apply things like text formatting or visual styles to blocks. Well, these styles are also available as Panels styles. This means that you can apply the same styles from your Fusion theme to panel regions or panel panes.
To use these styles, first set up the layout and content in your panel. Make sure you are on the Panel Content tab:
You’ll see there are two gear icons available in each section. The outer one controls the style for the panel region, whereas the smaller one in the dark gray bar controls the style for that individual panel pane. Depending on which one you want to change, click on the corresponding gear, and you’ll get a dropdown menu with some options. For panes, you should see a subheading that says Style. Click on “Change” in this menu:
You’ll then see a set of options, one of which is Skinr. Choose this and click Next.
The next screen then has the familiar block styles from your theme in it, which you can select like usual to apply to your panel pane. Click Save, and then Save again on the Panels administration page to save the entire panel.
Now you should see your styled panel pane!
You can check out this Panels page here on Acquia Marina’s demo site.
Note that since Panels has its own layout system, Fusion’s grid block width options are not available in Panels.
What about Panels Everywhere?
Panels Everywhere is a new module that allows you to use Panels to replace your entire site’s layout, doing away with the blocks admin system entirely. The Fusion team is has investigated Panels Everywhere support and will release an experimental version of Fusion to support it soon, but we are not looking at creating custom Panels Everywhere layouts or supporting anything more than region/pane styling in subthemes at this point.
