modules

Here's the second installment of my Amazon and Drupal experiments.

First, a note on a topic I mentioned, the recent requirement that Amazon affiliates go to aws.amazon.com to acquire a new Access Key ID and Secret Access Key: The Amazon module kindly warns you right on your main admin page if your Keys are incomplete or outdated. Here's the message I didn't spot when I was troubleshooting things on my own:

The Amazon API must be configured with an Access Key ID and an Amazon AWS Secret Access Key to function. Go to Amazon API Setttings.

Helpful! All right then, on to a new feature, Amazon Stores:

How can you easily add Amazon product links to a Drupal site? If you've been working with Drupal at all, you can guess the answer: There's a module for that!

That would be the Amazon module. Yet... How do you use that module? As noted in this forum thread, the module contains nearly no documentation, and I failed to find anything among the Drupal.org handbooks. 

There's a little documentation on Drupal.org for the Amazon Store module but not for the Amazon module itself. This finding is repeated inside a comment at comment at Drupal Modules.com: "It doesn't have any documentation on how to use it but I found a lot out by visiting the issue queue and reading the user posts."

I'm trying to get Amazon working on another site, just a simple way to display some Amazon offerings alongside a node, or even an in-site "store". One solution, of course, is to paste Amazon code directly into nodes or blocks, but that's somewhat static; I'm interested in seeing what a module can do to improve upon that. Some problems and in-progress solutions:

A short tale of how I got the links page working after a Weblinks module upgrade broke it.

The ideal solution would be to track down the exact problem, posting issues and working with the module's maintainers, finally squaring everything away with the current module version. However, the issues page doesn't show anyone else having trouble with the module; the problem may be an obscure glitch related to my frequent abuse of this site for experimentation purposes. More importantly, at the moment I'm short on time to fiddle with this. I decided I'd just go back to the previous version of the module and be done with it.

Here's the process, including an unexpected problem necessitating light database vivisection:

My Available Updates page (admin/reports/updates) informed me of some freshly-scrubbed module updates milling at the gates. So I let a few in... and a couple of ingrates are soiling the carpet and wiping their hands on the drapes.

Web Links

Version 6.x-2.1 of the Web Links module did something nasty to my once-beautiful links page. There are now way too many terms appearing, most of which contain no links within. Those that do display their links oddly. I'm not seeing similar reports on the issues page. Must track down problem.

SEO Checklist

Version 6.x-2.0 of the SEO Checklist module causes various admin pages to spit out errors like this:

user warning: Duplicate entry 'sites/all/modules/seo_checklist/seochecklist.module' for key 1 query: INSERT INTO system (name, info, type, filename, status, throttle, bootstrap) VALUES ('seochecklist', 'a:10:{s:4:\"name\";s:15:\"\"SEO\" Checklist\";s:11:\"description\";s:52:\"A Search Engine Optimization checklist for Drupal 6.\";s:4:\"core\";s:3:\"6.x\";s:7:\"package\";s:15:\"\"SEO\" Checklist\";s:7:\"version\";s:7:\"6.x-

Mmm, that's good summer readin'!

Funny, the module's not even enabled. Enabling it and running update.php, I still get such errors in the update report and in admin pages... but wait, it's still not enabled. I can't enable it. I see someone's having the same problem here, so that should help me solve things. 

"I'm new to Drupal. What modules should I check out?"

That's a common Drupal beginner question. Everyone (even the newbie who asks) knows the general answer: "It depends entirely upon what your site needs." But that doesn't help the beginner much with making a start. "You can do anything, because Drupal has over 4000 modules!" is wonderful news to the ambitious newbie's ear – yet it's pretty frightening, too.

The smart Drupal beginner will rightly ask, "Okay, I know there's a bushel of modules for any feature I have in mind, and I look forward to exploring them in detail... but for now, what are some common favorites for Drupal sites of every stripe?"

A good list of popular, all-round workhorse modules can quickly get a newcomer on the path to a functional site. Here's a list of my most-used Drupal 6 favorites, plus a few recommendations for beginners, based on butter-fingered experience with over a dozen sites. I'd love to see comments with additional (or better) ideas!