For all those reading this tutorial

A group of Drupal developers are working on a way to automate at least some of the tasks here, and I've had an epiphany that may, within the next week or so, at least make the process less tedious. I still recommend going through this tutorial, though, to understand the nuts and bolts of what goes on behind the scenes, as a learning exercise on working with these modules, and because hey--Why wait a week or two when you can get things going now, eh?

Final tweaks

Rob's picture
Submitted by Rob on Thu, 2009-05-21 04:36

Things are still going to be a little wonky, so here are the finishing touches.

Go back to Views, find the view you just made in the list, and click edit. In the editing interface, click the display you created for that view earlier.

Under Basic settings where it says, "Row style:Fields," click on Fields, and in the form that appears below, change it from "fields" to "node," and hit update. Once you click the update button, you'll see some configuration options. Set to Full Node (as opposed to Teaser), and "Show comments." Again, hit the "Update default display" button.

Why didn't we set our display to nodes to begin with, you may ask? For some reason, custom views will only show up as an option in Custom pagers on a view with the row style set to fields, but once the pager is assigned, it will stay put even after changing the view row style to node. It took me quite a bit of time mucking about with things before I stumbled across this workaround, and I have no explanation why it works that way.

Now that you've updated your view, hit save. You're nearing the end now. Go to your menu administration page to your primary menu and activate the menu item you created earlier. The only other thing you really need to worry about is that ugly "submitted by" stuff at the top of each comic. If you want to get rid of that, change those settings for your theme in your admin >> themes >> configure page.

At this point, if you've done everything right, you'll see something like the image below when you click on the link for your comic.

(Of course, the "first" link won't show up on your first page, since you're already there, nor will the "last" link show on the most recent comic, for the same reason.)

Depending on your theme, you may need to play with the CSS some to get it to display exactly the way you want. If you're not seeing this, retrace your steps and see what you missed--Finding your mistakes and correcting them is a good way to learn what you're doing. If things are still wonky, post a comment here and I'll see how I can help.

You're all set up with the basics for now. In other tutorials we'll explore making admin easier, beefing up security, and tricking out your site in general. Congratulations, and happy webcomicing.