HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
As you can see from the screenshots, there's a lot more to Drupal than the few simple
concepts I introduced. The popularity of Drupal is growing because it provides the flexi-
bility to create many kinds of sites without requiring programming skills on the part of
the programmer. The downside is that Drupal is rather complex. If you just want to pub-
lish a weblog or a few static pages, applications like TypePad and WordPress are easier
to get started with. However, if your site will eventually grow to encompass many kinds
of features, you may find that Drupal better suits your requirements.
Other Sites into Your Pages
One alternative to content management systems is to create your content in a hosted web
application and then use widgets provided by that application to integrate the content into
your own web pages. You've already learned how to embed videos hosted by YouTube
into web pages. It turns out that many other sites provide the same functionality. The
modern Web is all about integrating sites to take advantage of the strengths of each.
It's common to set up a blog or website using a tool like WordPress and then to augment
the capabilities of that software by incorporating content from other sites, too. So, you
can use your content management system for what it's best at, and you can use other
sites for what they're best at, and incorporate it all into a single website. In this section, I
talk about widgets because they're easy to use. You go to a website, enter the informa-
tion you need to create the widget, and then paste the embed code into your page, just as
you would with a YouTube video.
These sites also provide ways to integrate their content into your site that you can take
advantage of with your favorite server-side programming language, but such techniques
are beyond the scope of this topic. You may want to look into plug-ins for your content
management system that can be used to pull content from the sites that you use into your
own site.
Using Photos from Flickr
Flickr (
http://flickr.com)
is a popular photo hosting site owned by Yahoo! Flickr is a
photo sharing community. You can upload your own photos, view and comment on other
people's photos, and create groups and photo pools. You can also use photos on Flickr on
your own site. Many Flickr users license their photos under terms that allow them to be
used on other websites. If you want to use a photo of a willow tree to post on your own
site, you can find a properly licensed photo on Flickr to use rather than taking one
yourself. To find photos, go to
http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/,
shown in
Figure 22.17.
