Drupal Books

Using Drupal (Paperback)

Using Drupal (Paperback)$38.20

Amazon.com Review

Using Drupal cuts out a lot of the research time and helps you dive headfirst into Drupal. It does an excellent job of explaining how to rapidly assemble a wide variety of websites using some of Drupal’s most commonly used modules. Whether you’re new to building websites or an experienced programmer, this book is full of useful information. By the end of Using Drupal, you’ll be much more prepared to build the Drupal site you’ve always wanted.

Is That Site Running Drupal? By Angela Byron Various attempts at “fingerprinting” a Drupal site have been tried in the past, none of which are completely foolproof. These range from *super* easy stuff like checking for CHANGELOG.txt to checking the source for a reference to “drupal.css” (Drupal 4.7) to checking for common paths like taxonomy/term/1, and /user, (which might be aliased to something else with something like Pathauto/Path Redirect module), and so on. However, since Drupal 4.6, there’s a super geeky trick you can use to fingerprint a Drupal site that works 90% of the time. 1. Get Firefox. 2. Get the Live HTTP Headers extension. 3. After restarting Firefox, click Tools > Live HTTP Headers. This’ll pop up a little window to the side. 4. Visit a website you suspect of being Drupalish. 5. Highlight the Live HTTP headers window and type “exp”, looking for the following in the output: “Expires: Sun, 19 Nov 1978 05:00:00 GMT”

“Classic” Web Problems, Solved Drupal version: 6.x By Jeff Eaton A lot of energy in the Drupal world goes towards solving complex problems: giving administrators ways to build publishing workflows without writing code, integrating with cool new APIs, automatically translating site content into Klingon… You know. The usual. With all of that energy focused on complex architectural problems, it’s easy to lose sight of the simple solutions that Drupal provides for really common “classic” web problems. This really hit home the other week as I sifted through an old Zip disk with archives of sites I’d built for clients in the heady days of the late 90s. One by one, I started ticking off requests my clients had made that today’s site-builders can solve in minutes with Drupal modules–no wacky configuration, no complicated recipes. Just a simple, “Yes!” when a client says, “Can you…?” “…Make a splash page for the site?” No problem. Drop in the Splash module, and you can use any page on your site as an interstitial splash page. It’s also smart enough to tie into contextual information Drupal provides–only showing the splash screen to anonymous users, creating section-specific splash pages, and more. “…Let visitors print out copies of the pages?” While any web browser can print a simple copy of the current page, and custom style sheets can help clean up color schemes and images to make a page look printer-friendly, sometimes, things need tweaking. For example, embedded web links will look like simple underlined text if you rely on style sheet tweaks. Drupal’s Print module generates printer-friendly versions of any page, including the creation of URL footnotes at the bottom of each printout. It can also generate downloadable PDFs of any page, and send-this-article-to-a-friend email links. “…Show visitors a Terms Of Service page before they sign up to post on the site?” Letting users sign up to post comments, subscribe to newsletters, and so on was just catching on when I handcrafted those old-school sites in the ’90s. The Terms of Use module handles one of the tricky parts: requiring users to explicitly agree to terms of service before they can create an account. It lets you maintain your terms as a dedicated page on the site that users can read, and present it to them with an ‘Approval’ checkbox when they create an account. “…Add a chat page where users can talk in real-time?” Setting up chat rooms on web pages was always a pain in the old days. Even today it can be tricky, and there are quite a few different ways to do it. Flash, AJAX, Java applets, and more are all ready. The Mibbit module for Drupal lets site visitors chat on a custom IRC channel using a simple AJAX interface. Since it uses IRC as its backend, it can point to custom private discussion channels, or public ones like #drupal on the freenode IRC network. “…Keep other sites from stealing my content using Frames?” This one went out of style for a while, but when Google’s AdSense and other advertising networks up momentum, some enterprising individuals resurrected the concept of “wrapping” other sites in HTML frames, presenting ads in the sidebars while leeching the original site’s bandwidth and content. JavaScript can help: script snippets can force your page to open in a dedicated window instead of a frame, and the FramePrevention module makes that trick automatic. None of these modules are crazy, groundbreaking tools that get their own articles and tutorial videos. Like many of the tools in the Drupal world, though, they do the heavy lifting that lets us focus on the really complicated tasks. Looking back, it’s hard not to sigh and wonder how much time could’ve been saved if I’d had them at my disposal in The Olden Days…

Product Description

With the recipes in this book, you can take full advantage of the vast collection of community-contributed modules that make the Drupal web framework useful and unique. You’ll get the information you need about how to combine modules in interesting ways (with a minimum of code-wrangling) to develop a variety of community-driven websites. Each chapter describes a case study and outlines specific requirements for one of several projects included in the book — a wiki, publishing workflow site, photo gallery, product review site, online store, user group site, and more. With Using Drupal, you will:

  • Get an overview of Drupal concepts and key modules introduced in each chapter, with a bird’s-eye view of each module’s specialty and how it works
  • Explore various solutions within Drupal that meet the requirements for the project, with details about which modules are selected and why
  • Learn how to configure modules, with step-by-step recipes for building the precise functionality the project requires
  • Get information on additional modules that will make the project even more powerful
  • Be able to access the modules used in the chapter, along with other resources

Newcomers will find a thorough introduction to the framework, while experienced Drupal developers will learn best practices for building powerful websites. With Using Drupal, you’ll find concrete and creative solutions for developing the exact community website you have in mind.

Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition (Paperback)

Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition (Paperback)$31.49

Product Description

Widely praised for its in–depth coverage of Drupal internals, bestselling Pro Drupal Development has been completely updated for Drupal 6 in this latest edition, and there are even more tricks of the trade to help you further yourself as a professional Drupal developer.

Assuming you already know how to install and bring a standard installation online, John K. VanDyk gives you everything else you need to customize your Drupal installation however you see fit. Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition delves deep into Drupal internals, showing you how to take full advantage of its powerful architecture.

What you’ll learn

  • Find out how to create your own modules, develop your own themes, and produce your own filters.
  • Learn the inner workings of each key part of Drupal, including user management, sessions, the node system, caching, and the various APIs available to you.
  • Discover how to optimize your Drupal installation to perform well under high–load situations.
  • Gain the knowledge needed to secure your Drupal installation and other best practice techniques.
  • Learn to integrate Ajax into and internationalize your Drupal web site.

Who is this book for?

Web developers maintaining and creating sites with Drupal. It is assumed that you already know the basics of Drupal and are able to install and bring up a basic installation. This book takes you deeper into the internals of Drupal and teaches how to tweak and modify it in order to create that perfect web site. Simply put, if you are working with Drupal, you need Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition.

About the Apress Pro Series

The Apress Pro series books are practical, professional tutorials to keep you on and moving up the professional ladder.

You have gotten the job, now you need to hone your skills in these tough competitive times. The Apress Pro series expands your skills and expertise in exactly the areas you need. Master the content of a Pro book, and you will always be able to get the job done in a professional development project. Written by experts in their field, Pro series books from Apress give you the hard–won solutions to problems you will face in your professional programming career.

About the Author

John K. VanDyk has been a Drupal developer since 2004. In 2005, he organized the first Drupal conference in Antwerp, Belgium, with Drupal founder Dries Buytaert. John has contributed several modules to Drupal—including the actions, workflow, publish, subscribe, and pubcookie modules—and has been instrumental in the design of Drupal’s Content Construction Kit. John’s day job is as an entomology professor and systems analyst at Iowa State University, where he teaches undergraduate courses about insects. In his spare time, when not hacking on Drupal, John enjoys squash hunting and raising children.

Drupal For Dummies (Paperback)

Drupal For Dummies (Paperback)$19.79

Product Description

Learn to set up, manage, and administer a Drupal Web site

Drupal offers unparalleled flexibility for content-managed Web sites, but most Drupal books are written for expert developers. Drupal For Dummies shows you the fast, fun and easy way to get going with Drupal, set up a site, apply templates, use modules, and more, even if you have no programming experience.

Drupal For Dummies shows you how to take advantage of everything in Drupal that is ready to use, demystifying what may appear to be a complex set of tools.

  • Drupal is a free, open source modular framework and content management system designed for content-managed Web sites
  • Learn how to download Drupal, install the LAMP stack, and set up a site; no programming experience required
  • Organize and create your site’s content; apply templates, and get your first site up and running
  • Use modules and third-party templates
  • Follow plain-English instructions for site management, including making changes across the site and managing user access and privileges

Drupal For Dummies is designed to help the non-programmer who simply wants to turbocharge a blog or is responsible for administering a content-managed site.

From the Back Cover

Drop in and check out Drupal, the free, flexible framework for building and managing Web sites

Even if you’ve never built a Web site and the only thing you’ve programmed is your DVR, you really can set up a site with Drupal. This book shows you how to find and install the right version of Drupal, how to plan your site, and how to manage it. You can even beef it up with data from other sites, a storefront, an image gallery, and much more!

  • Start here — find the free software and get simple solutions on things like setting up a database and installing Drupal on a Web host
  • Who’s in charge — manage an administrator account, establish rules, and control site users
  • What’s on your site — create, manage, and edit your content, and decide whether to allow comments
  • Where’s your region? — work with themes and regions and manage menus
  • Open forum — create a site with a blog and forum and set up appropriate security
  • Stay current — keep Drupal up to date, monitor activity on your site, and locate new modules and themes to use
  • Cover your bases — maintain your database, back it up, and know how to restore it
  • Move up — see how Drupal can build a robust site that interacts with other sites and how to set up an online store

Open the book and find:

  • What Drupal is and what it’s not
  • Tools you need to install Drupal
  • How to decide on rules and settings for your site
  • Tips for telling your story quickly
  • Advice on choosing, changing, and configuring themes
  • All about modules
  • How to use reports
  • Secrets of good site security

Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting (Paperback)

Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting (Paperback)$26.39

Product Description

“For Drupal to succeed, we need books like this.”

–Dries Buytaert, Drupal founder and project lead

“Drupal faces a common problem on the Web–the relative lack of new, high quality themes. Front End Drupal tackles this problem directly and is designed to help both experienced designers and rank novices get an understanding of how Drupal theming works. In fact, I’ll be the first to admit I learned a lot from this book.”

– Dries Buytaert, Drupal founder and project lead

The Practical, Complete Guide to Customizing Drupal Sites with Behaviors, Themes, and Templates

Drupal is now the world’s #1 open source content management system: Thousands of individuals and organizations are using it to build and update Web sites of virtually every kind. As Web designers and developers adopt Drupal, they need ways to quickly customize the visuals and interactivity of their sites. Drupal offers powerful tools for doing so, but little guidance on using them effectively. Front End Drupal is the solution. In this book, two expert Drupal developers cover everything you need to know to create great visual designs and state-of-the-art interactivity with Drupal’s behaviors, themes, and templates.

Front End Drupal is 100% focused on issues of site design, behavior, usability, and management. The authors show how to style Drupal sites, make the most of Drupal’s powerful templating system, build sophisticated community sites, streamline site management, and build more portable, flexible themes. You’ll also gain hands-on experience through several case studies that walk you through the customization of everything from page templates to Web site forums.

  • Prepare and organize content so it’s easier to integrate into Drupal Web sites
  • Structure Drupal page templates that are easy to work with
  • Configure Drupal with the modules and browser tools you need to customize your site
  • Utilize Drupal’s Starter Themes and themes converted from WordPress, Joomla!™, and Drupal 5.x
  • Maximize the power and usability of Drupal’s content editing forms
  • Build usable community sites with user profiles, comments, and user-generated content
  • Use JavaScript™ to make your themes interactive and to enhance usability
  • Create powerful animations and AJAX callbacks with jQuery, Drupal’s JavaScript library

About the Web Site

The accompanying site, frontenddrupal.com, contains all sample code and themes presented in this book.

About the Author

Emma Jane Hogbin has been working as a Web developer since 1996, helping individuals and organizations to realize both their own potential and the potential of their online presence. She creates systems that enable her clients to succeed–by using her infectious enthusiasm and ability to explain concepts without using technical jargon that puts even the greatest technophobes at ease. Passionate about helping people to acquire knowledge, Emma volunteers with the Drupal and Ubuntu documentation teams. She is well known in the Drupal community not only for her technical knowledge, but also for her engaging and humorous means of bringing Drupal to a wider audience–such as the Drupal socks and their GPLed pattern. Through her consulting company HICK Tech, and at conferences around the world, Emma has inspired people to overcome fear, uncertainty, and doubt and to tackle problems head-on. She is known as “emmajane” on drupal.org and chronicles her adventures at http://www.emmajane.net.

Konstantin Käfer started his adventures into Web development in 1999. In high school, he led the Web development and school Web site class for several years. While still in high school, he also participated in Google’s Summer of Code 2006, doing usability enhancements for the Drupal project. In the Drupal community, he is widely known for his JavaScript skills. Konstantin has been a speaker at several DrupalCons and other Open Source conferences. He is currently studying IT Systems at the Hasso Plattner Institute Engineering in Potsdam, Germany. He also works as a consultant for NowPublic, a large citizen journalism Web site based on Drupal. He can be found blogging on http://kkaefer.com about design, Web development, and Drupal.

Cracking Drupal: A Drop in the Bucket (Paperback)

Cracking Drupal: A Drop in the Bucket (Paperback)$26.40

Product Description

The first book to reveal the vulnerabilities and security issues that exist in the sites that have been built with Drupal?and how to prevent them from continuing Drupal is an open source framework and content management system that allows users to create and organize content, customize presentation, automate tasks, and manage site visitors and contributors. Authored by a Drupal expert, this is the first book to reveal the vulnerabilities and security issues that exist in the sites that have been built with Drupal?and how to prevent them from continuing. The main goal of this guide is to explain how to write code that avoids an attack in the Drupal environment, while also addressing how to proceed if vulnerability has been spotted and then regain control of security.

From the Back Cover

Uncover threats and protect your Drupal® site with proven strategies

What is the worst-case scenario if your Web site gets attacked and the security is broken? By following the strategies in this guide, you don’t have to find out. It first walks you through the vulnerabilities you’ll face and the steps you should take to protect a basic Drupal site. You’ll then discover how to review a module to find weaknesses and fix them. And you’ll learn how to keep your site running securely by implementing more advanced techniques.

Take control of your site by learning how to:

  • Prevent the common ways that Drupal gets cracked
  • Uncover parts of the attack surface that can expose your site
  • Install extra modules and configure Drupal to maintain your site’s security
  • Control the security of your site using Drupal’s API
  • Utilize the Drupal Access system to limit who can see specific content
  • Test your site with automated scanners like Grendel
  • Follow strategies to find, exploit, and avoid vulnerabilities
  • Leverage resources from the Drupal Security Team

For all the code in this book, as well as all the latest updates, visit the Web site http://crackingdrupal.com.

Drupal 6 Themes: Create new themes for your Drupal 6 site with clean layout and powerful CSS styling (Paperback)

Drupal 6 Themes: Create new themes for your Drupal 6 site with clean layout and powerful CSS styling (Paperback)$31.57

Product Description

In Detail

Drupal is an award winning open source Content Management System (CMS). Based on PHP/MySQL, its power and flexibility combined with its exceptional design mean it is one of the most popular choices for creating a CMS website.

Drupal employs a specialized templating system and supports themes, which allow you to change the look and feel of the system’s front and back-end interfaces.

Drupal 6 Themes is an ideal introduction to theming with Drupal 6. If you want to create a striking new look for your Drupal 6 website, this book is for you. This book is a revised, updated and expanded edition of Drupal 5 Themes, written specifically for Drupal 6. The book will show you techniques and tools to help you improve the look and feel of any Drupal 6-powered website.

Starting from the basics of theme setup and configuration, you will learn about the Drupal theming architecture and the PHPTemplate engine, and then move on to modifying existing themes and building new themes from scratch. You will find out about tools to make your theme development easier, and also find invaluable information about under-documented elements of the theming system.

What you will learn from this book?

  • Learn about the Drupal 6 Theming Architecture
  • Find and install new themes
  • Get the most from Drupal’s theme configuration system
  • Create a new theme from scratch
  • Master PHPTemplate
  • Modify the default templates and styles
  • Override the default templates with your own
  • Create dynamic styling which responds to the content or the user
  • Discover tools that make theming easier and more efficient

Approach

This book helps you understand the logic behind the theming system employed in Drupal, and how to make it work for you. You will learn key concepts and work through examples with careful, step-by-step instructions.

Who this book is written for?

The main requirements to make use of this book are knowledge of HTML, CSS, and a touch of creativity – you don’t need to know anything about theming in Drupal, although you should be familiar with the basic operation of the Drupal system.

Although this book aims to make Drupal theming accessible to designers, theming in Drupal 6 involves writing some PHP code, and a basic knowledge of PHP will be helpful.

Regardless of your technical skills, this book will teach you to design themes for your Drupal websites in the easiest way.

About the Author

Ric Shreves is a partner in water&stone, a web development company that specializes in open source content management systems. He works primarily as a consultant and business systems analyst is currently on extended assignment with Peace Dividend Trust. He lives in Bali with his wife Nalisa, one dog, two cats, three turtles and a mind-boggling number of fish. First and foremost, I thank my loving wife Nalisa for her support and patience. It would also be remiss of me to fail to acknowledge my friend (and editor at ComputerWorld) Stefan Hammond, who provides more than a modicum of support and encouragement — together with much-needed reality checks. Ric Shreves is a partner in water&stone water&stone, a web development company that specializes in open source content management systems, including Drupal. Ric has been building websites professionally since 1999 and now works primarily as a web applications consultant. He lives in Bali with his wife Nalisa.

Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6: Build your own professional blog, forum, portal or community website with Drupal 6 (Paperback)

Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6: Build your own professional blog, forum, portal or community website with Drupal 6 (Paperback)$35.39

Product Description

In Detail

Drupal is a hugely popular and widely celebrated open-source Content Management System that is day-by-day becoming the first choice of people for building blogs and other websites. Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the father of the Internet), Hillary Clinton, and many others utilize Drupal to fulfil their online requirements.

Drupal is an elegantly designed, well-supported and flexible platform that anyone can use in order to create their own website. With such a powerful tool at your fingertips there is no longer any need to pay professionals to design a site when you can do the same job yourself absolutely free. All it takes is a bit of practice!

This book meets the booming demand for well presented, clear, concise, and above all practical information on how to move from knowing you want a website all the way through to designing and building it like a pro, and finally successfully managing and maintaining it.

Experienced technical author David Mercer expertly guides the reader through all the stages of building a professional website in a plain, articulate manner. Aimed in particular at beginners to Drupal, this book will allow readers to advance rapidly up the learning curve to the point where they can tackle any problem with confidence.

What you will learn from this book?

  • Plan and consider various design aspects of your site
  • Install, set up, and configure a Drupal development machine
  • Find your way around the vast array of Drupal settings with ease
  • Add and work with modules to enhance your website’s functionality
  • Control and manage your site’s content
  • Deal with security issues, users, and access control
  • Implement a customized interface for your website
  • Add powerful new features and learn advanced techniques
  • Deploy, manage, and maintain your website

Approach

Written in the same style as the original Drupal title, this book is a pragmatic look at the steps necessary to get a website up and running. Drawing on years of writing experience, David Mercer utilizes a friendly, engaging style that is both clear and concise – perfect for the Drupal newbie.

Who this book is written for?

This book is for people with little or no experience in website design, people who are not familiar with PHP, MySQL or HTML, and above all people with little to no experience in using Drupal. Even intermediate Drupal users will find this book of interest although it is specifically aimed at pushing beginners up the learning curve.

About the Author

David Mercer

David Mercer was born in August 1976 in Harare, Zimbabwe. Having always had a strong interest in science, David came into regular contact with computers at university where he graduated cum laude with majors in applied math and math (although he minored in computer science).

As a programmer and professional writer who has been writing both code and books for about nine years, he has worked on a number of well known titles, in various capacities, on a wide variety of topics. His books have sold tens of thousands of copies and have been translated into over 6 different languages to date.

David finds that the challenges arising from the dichotomous relationship between the science (and art) of software programming and the art (and science) of writing is what keeps his interest in producing books piqued. He will no doubt continue to write professionally in the future.

David balances his time between programming, reviewing, writing, and contributing to interesting web-based projects such as RankTracer and LinkDoozer. When he isn’t working (which isn’t that often) he enjoys playing guitar (generally on stage and unrehearsed) and getting involved in outdoor activities ranging from touch rugby and golf to water skiing and snowboarding. Visit RankTracer or find him on LinkDoozer where he is generally lurking.

Drupal Essential Training (CD-ROM)

Drupal Essential Training (CD-ROM)$49.95

Product Description

Drupal is a free, open-source content management system (CMS) for a variety of platforms. It has a robust user community and easy-to-use administration features. Drupal Essential Training covers all the important aspects of installing, configuring, customizing, and maintaining a Drupal-powered website. Instructor Tom Geller explores blogs, discussion forums, member profiles, and other features while demonstrating the steps required to make Drupal perform. He also teaches fundamental concepts and skills along the way, including installation, backups, and updates; security and permissions; flexible page layouts and CSS; menu navigation; and performance monitoring and disaster recovery. He also discusses how to select and install the community-supported modules that further expand Drupal’s capabilities, and gives experienced PHP programmers tips on customizing page templates. Example files accompany the course. Topics Include:

  • Understanding the inner workings of Drupal
  • Creating stories, pages, blogs, forums, and polls
  • Managing users and comments
  • Setting and customizing themes
  • Exchanging content via RSS
  • Stopping comment spam with a CAPTCHA
  • Launching a site and joining the Drupal community

Duration: 7 hours On 1 DVD-ROM System Requirements Macintosh Requirements

  • OS 10.3.9 or higher
  • DVD-ROM drive
  • 1024×768 resolution
  • 24-bit video support
  • QuickTime 7 or higher

Windows Requirements

  • XP or Vista
  • DVD-ROM Drive
  • 1024×768 resolution
  • 24-bit video support
  • PC sound card/speakers
  • QuickTime 7 or higher (included)
  • .NET 2.0 or higher (included)

From the Publisher

Each lynda.com CD/DVD course offers hours of training movies that you watch on your computer. The movies are recorded in pixel-perfect quality, and include the authors’ narration and movements as they teach the subject matter. Courses include the same project files that the instructors use, so you can follow along at your own pace. lynda.com tutorials are great for visual learners and people who like to learn by doing. Topics include software applications, workflow optimization, tips and techniques, and much more. Play, fast-forward, and rewind for easy learning.

Pro Drupal Development (Paperback)

Pro Drupal Development (Paperback)$35.60

Product Description

Pro Drupal Development is strongly recommended for any PHP programmer who wants a truly in-depth look at how Drupal works and how to make the most of it.

— Michael J. Ross, Web developer/Slashdot contributor

Drupal is one of the most popular content management systems in use today. With it, you can create a variety of community-driven sites, including blogs, forums, wiki-style sites, and much more. Pro Drupal Development was written to arm you with knowledge to customize your Drupal installation however you see fit. The book assumes that you already possess the knowledge to install and bring a standard installation online. Then authors John VanDyk and Matt Westgate delve into Drupal internals, showing you how to truly take advantage of its powerful architecture.

Youll learn how to create your own modules, develop your own themes, and produce your own filters. You’ll learn the inner workings of each key part of Drupal, including user management, sessions, the node system, caching, and the various APIs available to you. Of course, your Drupal-powered site isnt effective until you can efficiently serve pages to your visitors. As such, the authors have included the information you need to optimize your Drupal installation to perform well under high-load situations. Also featured is information on Drupal security and best practices, as well as integration of Ajax and the internationalization of your Drupal web site. Simply put, if you are working with Drupal at all, then you need this book.

  • This book is written by Drupal core developers.
  • Drupal architecture and behavior are mapped out visually.
  • Common pitfalls are identified and addressed.
  • Chapters provide regular discussion and reference to why things work they way they do, not just how.
  • The front matter features a foreword by Dries Buytaert, Drupal founder.

About the Author

John K. VanDyk has been a Drupal developer since 2004. In 2005, he organized the first Drupal conference in Antwerp, Belgium, with Drupal founder Dries Buytaert. John has contributed several modules to Drupal—including the actions, workflow, publish, subscribe, and pubcookie modules—and has been instrumental in the design of Drupal’s Content Construction Kit. John’s day job is as an entomology professor and systems analyst at Iowa State University, where he teaches undergraduate courses about insects. In his spare time, when not hacking on Drupal, John enjoys squash hunting and raising children.

Matt Westgate is a core developer of the Drupal project and original author of the e-commerce package for Drupal. Matt also wrote the path aliasing module, along with many contributed modules such as tinymce and img_assist. He currently co-operates Lullabot, a consulting/training firm focused on making open source software easy to use and understand.

Sams Teach Yourself Drupal in 24 Hours (Paperback)

Sams Teach Yourself Drupal in 24 Hours (Paperback)$23.09

Product Description

In just 24 sessions of one hour or less, learn how to build powerful, easy-to-maintain websites with Drupal–fast! Using this book’s straightforward, step-by-step approach, you’ll master every skill you’ll need, from organizing sites and using Drupal’s design themes to setting up search, polls, forums, and security. Each lesson builds on what you’ve already learned, giving you a rock-solid foundation for real-world success!

Step-by-step instructions carefully walk you through the most common Drupal tasks.

Quizzes and Exercises at the end of each chapter help you test your knowledge.

By the Way notes present interesting information related to the discussion. Did You Know? tips offer advice or show you easier ways to perform tasks. Watch Out! cautions alert you to possible problems and give you advice on how to avoid them.

Jesse Feiler provides consulting services to small businesses and non-profits through his company, North Country Consulting (northcountryconsulting.com). His recent books include FileMaker Pro 10 In Depth, The Bento Book, How to Do Everything with Web 2.0 Mashups, and iWork ‘09 For Dummies®.

Register your book at informit.com/register for convenient access to all sample project source code, as well as updates and corrections as they become available.

Category: Web Development

Covers: Drupal

User Level: Beginning—Intermediate

Learn how to…

  • Make the most of Drupal, whether you’re building business, non-profit, or personal sites
  • Download, install, and configure open source Drupal 6 and 7, and make sure it’s working properly
  • Plan and organize your sites so they are easy to manage–and friendly to both users and search engines
  • Customize sites with Drupal’s extensive library of optional open source modules
  • Create barebone sites and home pages automatically
  • Add text, images, links, and other essential site features
  • Master Drupal’s powerful Content Construction Kit (CCK)
  • Incorporate new types of content, ranging from articles to e-commerce products
  • Secure Drupal sites by managing users, permissions, roles, and user profiles
  • Categorize and tag content, and implement full-text search
  • Promote user involvement with polls, comments, forums, RSS feed aggregation, blogs, and newsletters
  • Automate and simplify site management with Triggers, Actions, and Rules

About the Author

In 1998, Jesse Feiler wrote Database-Driven Web Sites, one of the first books about the marriage of databases and the web. This relationship between databases and the web has grown and encompassed blogs and Content Management Systems (CMS), culminating in Drupal.

Jesse is the author of numerous books on Mac OS X, FileMaker, the web, and various other technologies, such as Bento, mashups, and Facebook. Jesse has worked as a developer and manager for companies such as the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (monetary policy and bank supervision), Prodigy (early web browser), Apple (information systems), New York State Department of Health (rabies and lead poisoning), The Johnson Company (office management), and Young & Rubicam (media planning and new product development). He also consults with small business and nonprofits in areas such as publishing, production, web technology, and contact management. Active in the community, Jesse has served on various nonprofit boards, including HB Studio and Mid-Hudson Library System, as well as zoning and planning boards. He has conducted trustee training sessions for Clinton-Essex-Franklin Library System and other groups. Feiler’s website is www.northcountryconsulting.com. It is, of course, powered by Drupal. Downloadable files, updates, and discussion forums for this book are located there.

Learning Drupal 6 Module Development: A practical tutorial for creating your first Drupal 6 modules with PHP (Paperback)

Learning Drupal 6 Module Development: A practical tutorial for creating your first Drupal 6 modules with PHP (Paperback)$31.57

Product Description

In Detail

With great power comes… tremendous flexibility. Drupal is an award-winning open-source Content Management System, and the feature-packed sixth release is right around the corner. It’s a modular system, with an elegant hook-based architecture, and great code. These are a few of the perks that make Drupal a choice platform for developers who want the power of an established CMS, but the freedom to make it work for them. From social networking to AJAX to e-commerce, the hundreds of existing modules attest to Drupal’s flexibility. When you create a new module for Drupal, it fits seamlessly into the look and feel of your overall site. If you can think it in PHP, you can code it as a Drupal module.

Dive into Drupal module development as we create the Philosopher Biographies website, developing new modules and themes to meet practical goals. Create custom content types. Add AJAX functionality with the jQuery library. Use external XML APIs to add content to your site. Email newsletters to site members. Use themes. Empower administrators with extra features. And bundle it all up in a custom installation profile. You won’t find a "hello world" here!

If you’re eager to start creating modules for Drupal 6, this is your book. Walk through the development of complete Drupal modules with this primer for PHP programmers. Specifically written for Drupal 6, this book will get you coding modules as quickly as possible, and help you add the features that will give your work that professional gloss!

Just getting started with Drupal development? This book will give you a clear, concise and, of course, practical guidance to take you from the basics of creating your first module to developing the skills to make you a Drupal developer to be reckoned with.

Are you a Drupal developer looking to update to version 6? This book covers the new and updated APIs to guide your transition to Drupal 6. The new menu system, the Forms and Schema APIs, and many core revisions are covered in this book.

What you will learn from this book?

  • A developer’s overview of important Drupal concepts and APIs, like nodes, menus, and forms
  • Using Drupal tools for module development
  • Creating a new module from scratch
  • Harnessing the power of the Drupal hook system
  • Using key Drupal functions
  • Creating custom content types, from basic to advanced
  • Performing database operations
  • Writing module installers and uninstallers
  • Making Drupal content available to JavaScript with a JSON service
  • Interacting with the theme system to build crisp layouts
  • Creating richer user interfaces with Drupal’s JavaScript libraries
  • Working with blocks, nodes, actions, and menus
  • Using a web service to retrieve and display XML data
  • Creating an administration interface
  • Customizing user profiles
  • Writing actions and triggering them with events
  • Working with the Forms API
  • Defining custom hooks and making modules work together
  • Exploring the database and schema API
  • Creating an installation profile to bundle your modules into a custom Drupal distribution

Who this book is written for?

This book is written for PHP developers who want to add custom features to Drupal. You will need to know the basics of PHP and MySQL programming, but no experience of programming Drupal is required, although you will be expected to be familiar with the basic operation of Drupal.

About the Author

Matt Butcher

Matt Butcher is a senior programmer at Palantir.net, where he specializes in content management systems, web services, and browser scripting. He has been an active participant in Open Source technologies for over a decade. Matt has written five books for Packt, including Learning Drupal 6 Module Development, Mastering OpenLDAP, and Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery., all of which are published by Packt. Matt writes his technical blog at technosophos.com. When not pushing bits, Matt likes to explore Chicago with his wife and three daughters.

Drupal 6 Content Administration (Paperback)

Drupal 6 Content Administration (Paperback)$31.57

Product Description

Maintain, add to, and edit content of your Drupal site with ease

  • Keep your Drupal site up to date: easily edit, add to, and maintain your site’s content, even if you’ve never used Drupal before!
  • Covers the full range of content that you might want on your site: richly formatted text, images, videos, as well as blog posts, calendar events, and more
  • Get to grips with managing users, slaying spam, and other activities that will help you maintain a content-rich site
  • Concise, targeted information with easy-to-follow hands-on examples

In Detail

Often a company hires a web designer to build its Drupal site, and then takes over running the site in house. This book is for the Content Editors concerned with the ongoing creation and maintenance of the site content.

In a few hours, you’ll have the knowledge needed to maintain and edit your web site as a content-rich place that visitors return to again and again. There are many books available to help you administer a Drupal site, but this is the only one specifically for Content Editors. This book doesn’t cover designing or creating a site. However, anybody who has built their own site but needs some help using the article management features will also benefit from it.

This book is a quick-start guide, aimed at Content Editors. The author’s experience enables him to explain in an efficient and interactive manner how you can keep your site up to date. The book begins with a discussion of content management and Drupal and then teaches you how to create content, add elements to it, and make the content findable. You will then learn to set up the framework for a creative team and the various options for editing content offline, their benefits and pitfalls.

This book helps you to quickly and easily solve problems, and manage content and users for a web site. It will help you become a more effective and efficient manager of Drupal-based web sites.

What you will learn from this book?

  • Learn the various methods of inputting text , the various content creation and editing capabilities that are available to users
  • Add elements to your content to spice it up: teasers, links, images, embedded sound, embedded video, PDFs
  • Make changes to the article you created, use a PHP snippet to provide content, edit a revised article
  • Apply basic Search Engine Optimization by creating a URL and category tags to complement the content
  • Create a text block in order to make content available in multiple locations, create a video block to use in the site margin, create a blog entry
  • Set up the framework for a creative editorial team having editors with different roles and privileges, working together to keep the site up to date
  • Use options for creating and editing content offline and via email and apply each of the methods you learned to send content to the project site

Approach

This is a fun, informative, hands-on learning guide that uses an actual case study. In an interactive and informal manner, this guide presents purposeful examples that continue to build on each other. Clear, concise instructions and practical examples mean you can learn quickly how to take care of the content in your Drupal site.

Who this book is written for?

This book is designed for those who run the site day-to-day but didn’t set it up, and aren’t necessarily that well versed in Drupal or web technologies.

You could be a content editor, proofreader, graphic artist, feature editor, or anyone else concerned with managing content on a Drupal installation.

About the Author

J. Ayen Green

J. Ayen Green is a software and web site developer, writer, and poet. He and his wife, Sofía-Aileen, make their home in New York City.

Pro Drupal 7 Development, Third Edition (Paperback)

Pro Drupal 7 Development, Third Edition (Paperback)$31.49

Product Description

This book is geared toward professionals that need to deploy and customize Drupal. This book delves deep into the internals of the Drupal 7 system and teaches you everything you need to know to deploy a highly customized and optimized Drupal installation. Every web developer looking to deploy web sites quickly to their clients while still being able to harness the power of an excellent content management system needs this book.

What you’ll learn

  • What Drupal is and why you should use it
  • How to install a basic Drupal web site from scratch
  • How to create content in your new Drupal web site
  • How to manage users on your new Drupal web site
  • How to change the look and feel of your new Drupal web site through themes
  • How to install and configure modules

Who this book is for

This book is for existing Drupal module developers wanting to learn about Drupal 7 and people already knowledgeable in PHP who are interested in developing for Drupal. Simply put, if you are working with Drupal, then you need this book.

About the Author

Dave Reid is a freelance developer and has been using Drupal for over three years. He has been active In core development for the last year, helping shape the direction of Drupal 7 and beyond. He maintains several popular Drupal modules, including Mollom and XML sitemap. He previously attended the University of Nebraska – Lincoln in the Raikes School of Computer Science and Management.

Dave lives with his fiancee Jenny in Omaha, Nebraska along with their new kitten Athena.

Drupal 6 Social Networking (Paperback)

Drupal 6 Social Networking (Paperback)$31.57

Product Description

Build a social or community web site, with friends lists, groups, custom user profiles, and much more

  • Step-by-step instructions for putting together a social networking site with Drupal 6
  • Customize your Drupal installation with modules and themes to match the needs of almost any social networking site
  • Allow users to collaborate and interact with each other on your site
  • Requires no prior knowledge of Drupal or PHP; but even experienced Drupal users will find this useful to modify an existing installation into a social web site

In Detail

Drupal is ideally equipped to be used as a base system for creating a custom social networking site like Facebook and MySpace. While these large social networks have their place, niche social networking web sites can help promote businesses, products, projects, and hobbies of any nature.

This book provides careful instructions and clear explanations to take you through the setup and management of your social network site, covering topics from users to marketing to maintenance. It will help you create your own social networking site, suitable for whatever audience you decide!

This book will take you from the very basics of both Drupal and Social Networking right through to more complicated aspects, like creating your own custom design and features for the site. With no experience of Drupal required, the book will introduce you to this award-winning CMS and carefully take you through the steps to create a social networking site from it. As the book progresses, you will learn how to add to and expand your social networking site, adding more features and adding value for your users, and how to make your users feel part of the community. Social networking web sites rely on their users contributing to the site, and this book helps you structure a site in a way users can easily and enjoyable contribute to the site – creating a powerful social network.

The book begins with the fundamental concepts of a Social Networking site, and how we can use Drupal to create such a site. It then goes through installing Drupal before looking at expanding the out-of-the-box feature set with third-party modules designed for Social Networking. Once the web site is running, it looks at securing the Social Network, deploying it on the Internet, and keeping it running and well maintained. It doesn’t stop there however; as Social Networks rely on their user base to run and become successful, the book also covers marketing the Social Network using Search Engine Optimization, Online Marketing, and a range of new Social Media.

What you will learn from this book?

  • Get started with Drupal and explore the features of this powerful Content Management System.
  • Build a social networking site from the ground up using Drupal 6
  • Use a combination of features, modules and some simple custom development to allow user interaction and user contributions
  • Enable your users to interact and communicate with one another, building friendship
  • Let your users contribute to the site, from those who wish to add a little content to those who wish to help run the site on a daily basis
  • Import content into your site from elsewhere on the Internet using the Aggregator module
  • Create user profiles, set up roles and permissions, and handle security settings
  • Explore Drupal’s modular system, and use it to create modules to add additional functionality relevant and useful to your social network.
  • Customize the look and feel of your site by enabling and installing new themes, ensuring that your site is distinctive
  • Deploy and maintain your social networking site on the Internet using the maintenance mode, reports, and cron to keep everything running smoothly
  • Recover from virus attacks and hacking attempts to your Social Network by making and maintaining regular backups, in case the worst should happen
  • Promote and market your Social Network using advertisements, advertising networks, other social networks, and search engine optimization

Approach

This book is packed with clear instructions and careful explanations for creating a powerful Social Networking web site using Drupal 6. With each chapter, you add new features and content until the Social Network is ready to be released to the Internet where it can grow.

By the end of this book, you will have a powerful Social Network either like that of the case-study, or of your own design based on the setup and features the book walks through.

Who this book is written for?

This book is aimed at anyone looking to create their own social networking web site, including:

  • Businesses – building a Social Network around a product or service can improve your company profile and increase customer loyalty. Alternatively, an internal social network gives you employees a place to keep resources, discuss ideas, raise concerns, and keep up to date on company policies.
  • Hobbyists – create a community around your hobbies and interests; create a local or distributed user group.
  • Organisations & Charities – Raise your profile, promote your events / services / fundraisers and get help from the community in organizing them.
  • Families – For large families based across the country or across the globe, keep up to date with everyone, and let everyone know what you are up to.

You don’t need any experience of Drupal or PHP to use this book. If you are a Drupal user you will find this book a great way to rapidly tailor an existing installation into a social-orientated web site.

About the Author

Michael Peacock

Michael Peacock is a web developer from Newcastle, UK and has a degree in Software Engineering from the University of Durham. After meeting his business partner at Durham, he co-founded Peacock Carter, a Newcastle based creative consultancy specializing in web design, web development and corporate identity.

Michael loves working on web related projects. When he is not working on client projects, he is often tinkering with a web app of his own.

He has been involved with a number of books, having written two books himself (and working on his third): Selling online with Drupal e-Commerce Packt, and Building websites with TYPO3 Packt. He has also done technical reviews of two other books: Mobile Web Development Packt, and Drupal Education & E-Learning Packt.

You can follow Michael on Twitter.

Leveraging Drupal: Getting Your Site Done Right (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)

Leveraging Drupal: Getting Your Site Done Right (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)$32.99

Product Description

This book is a step-by-step guide and a hands-on co-piloted experience for those trying to make Drupal powered websites work for them, and for their clients. Much more than a “tutorial”, what is needed is a nuts-and-bolts living mentor and guide which really shows the reader how to do the things really required for bringing it all together in a site which works. This will be the only book covering all the difficult components of Drupal: views, panels, themes, content creation, etc. The book will cover:
* How to upgrade your hopelessly outdated and obsolete-software dependent site and bring it into the Drupal mainstream and future
* How to become a great Drupal themer and make “non-Drupal” looking sites
* How to really customize Drupal for your real needs
* How to start using best practices in Drupal web application development
* How to work like the pro Drupal shops and be ready for big projects – and small ones
* Learn by example (code samples, theme samples, videos) at every step

From the Back Cover

Leveraging Drupal®

As an open source, community-based content management system and web site application development framework, Drupal allows you to create interactive, media-based, database-driven web sites that become a part of everyday activities and communications. This unique book is the first of its kind to tackle the challenging task of leveraging Drupal to get a site done right and make that site work for you, based on industry-wide software development best practices.

Within these pages, you will gain insight into how to work with any release of Drupal, approach your project, establish a development environment, plan for deployment, and avoid pitfalls along the way. A real-world example of a web site application based on Drupal—an online Literary Workshop—is used throughout the book, and it walks you through the entire development lifecycle. You’ll learn how to bring your web site into the exciting Drupal mainstream, customize Drupal for your specific needs, and even make “non-Drupal” looking sites. With this hands-on guide, you’ll discover how to use Drupal to efficiently publish, manage, and organize a wide variety of content on your web site.

What you will learn from this book

  • Best practices to optimize the way you approach development projects

  • Methods for setting up a development environment using version control and issue tracking tools

  • How the Drupal theming system works and how it separates content from presentation and style

  • Techniques for upgrading and deploying the online Literary Workshop

  • The future of Drupal and how it might be developed and used

Who this book is for

This book is for Drupal users of all levels of expertise who are looking to put together a sophisticated web application.

Wrox guides are crafted to make learning programming languages and technologies easier than you think. Written by programmers for programmers, they provide a structured, tutorial format that will guide you through all the techniques involved.

Drupal’s Building Blocks: Quickly Building Websites with CCK, Views and Panels (Paperback)

Drupal’s Building Blocks: Quickly Building Websites with CCK, Views and Panels (Paperback)$29.69

About the Author

Earl Miles, a co-founder and permanent member of the Drupal Association, wrote Drupal’s Views, Panels, and several smaller modules, and is responsible for major improvements to Drupal 6’s theming and install systems. A lifelong programmer, he is currently Director, Web Technologies for Sony BMG. Lynette Miles is a lead product engineer in technical support for Alcatel-Lucent, where she has worked for over a decade. As a member of the Drupal documentation team, she is helping to rewrite and reorganize Drupal.org’s vast documentation to make answers easier to find and understand.

Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery (Paperback)

Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery (Paperback)$31.57

Product Description

Putting jQuery, AJAX, and JavaScript effects into your Drupal 6 modules and themes

  • Learn about JavaScript support in Drupal 6
  • Packed with example code ready for you to use
  • Harness the popular jQuery library to enhance your Drupal sites
  • Make the most of Drupal’s built-in JavaScript libraries

In Detail

JavaScript: It’s not just for calculators and image rollovers.

Drupal 6 is loaded with new features, and not all of them are necessarily implemented in PHP. This unique book, for web designers and developers, will take you through what can be done with JavaScript (and especially with jQuery) in Drupal 6.

With the combination of the powerhouse jQuery library with its own robust set of JavaScript tools, Drupal 6 comes with a pre-packaged killer JavaScript environment. Cross-platform by nature, it provides all of the tools necessary to create powerful AJAX-enabled scripts, gorgeous visual effects, and view-enhancing behaviors. In addition, Drupal developers have ported some of its most powerful PHP tools – like a theming engine and support for localization and language translation – to JavaScript, making it possible to write simple scripts where once only complex PHP code could be used.

This book gives you the keys to the toolbox, showing you how to use Drupal’s JavaScript libraries to make your modules and themes more dynamic, interactive and responsive, and add effects to make your Drupal site explode into life!

If you’ve dipped your toe in the water of theme or module development with Drupal 6, this is the book you want to make the look and behavior of your work something special. With it’s project-based approach, this book is carefully constructed to guide you from how JavaScript fits into the overall Drupal architecture through to making you a master of the jQuery library in the world of Drupal themes and modules.

What you will learn from this book?

  • An introduction to JavaScript in Drupal 6
  • The basics of the jQuery library
  • Creating JavaScript-enabled themes
  • Manipulating a page on the fly with jQuery
  • Authoring simple PHPTemplate files designed to maximize scripting potential
  • Using jQuery to add effects in Drupal 6
  • Working with Drupal 6 behaviors
  • Adding AJAX to modules
  • Using Drupal’s localization and language translation engine in your JavaScript
  • Theming on the client-side with Drupal’s JavaScript theme engine
  • Building better forms
  • Working with Drupal 6’s JavaScript library
  • Writing portable JavaScript tools as Drupal modules

Approach

This book focuses on teaching by example. Chapters are packed with example code, providing hands-on examples you can play with and then release to your own Drupal sites. By introducing short projects interspersed with discussion, the pace is rapid yet practical.

Who this book is written for?

This book is for web designers and developers who want to add JavaScript elements to Drupal themes or modules to create more flexible and responsive user interfaces.

You are expected to know about the basic operation of Drupal, and be familiar with the concept of theming and modules in Drupal. No experience of creating themes or modules is required.

You will need to know the basics of client-side web development; this means HTML, CSS, but also have a rudimentary grasp of the syntax of JavaScript. Familiarity with PHP programming will be an advantage, since we will be writing PHPTemplate files and (at the end) creating Drupal modules. However, the PHP is covered thoroughly enough that even the PHP neophyte will not find the text too demanding. The book also covers the jQuery JavaScript library and its use in Drupal, but no knowledge of jQuery is expected – you will learn everything you need in this book.

About the Author

Matt Butcher

Matt Butcher is a senior programmer at Palantir.net, where he specializes in content management systems, web services, and browser scripting. He has been an active participant in Open Source technologies for over a decade. Matt has written five books for Packt, including Learning Drupal 6 Module Development, Mastering OpenLDAP, and Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery., all of which are published by Packt. Matt writes his technical blog at technosophos.com. When not pushing bits, Matt likes to explore Chicago with his wife and three daughters.

Drupal Multimedia (Paperback)

Drupal Multimedia (Paperback)$31.57

Product Description

In Detail

Adding and handling multimedia in Drupal, such as images or video, requires the use of many contributed modules, and deciding which ones to use and how to get the most from them is often not a straightforward task.

This book will guide you through the steps necessary to add image, video, audio, and Flash elements into your Drupal sites. The book will take you through the contributed modules for handling media, showing you what they do, when to use them, and how to get the most from them. When contributed modules aren’t enough, you will see examples of custom Drupal development to add that special touch to your media.

What you will learn from this book? You will learn to:

  • Find your way round contributed modules for adding media to Drupal sites
  • Store and display images in nearly any configuration a client may desire
  • Scale and crop images before display on your site with ImageCache
  • Add effects to your images such as drop shadows, light boxes, and more
  • Examine how a developer may use Views, Embedded Media Field, and other tools to make embedding video even easier
  • Add and manipulate video at a field level using the File Field module
  • Create thumbnail overlays with jQuery
  • Create custom audio fields

Approach

This book will guide you through the steps necessary to add image, video, audio, and Flash elements into your Drupal sites. For each topic, you start with simple techniques and move on to more advanced techniques. By the time you’ve completed this book, you should have a firm ground from which to tackle most multimedia needs, and enough of an understanding to creatively solve more complex problems.

Who this book is written for?

This book will provide information for administrators and professional site developers who are required to embed multimedia into a Drupal site. The reader needs basic knowledge of Drupal operation, but no experience of how Drupal handles multimedia items is expected.

About the Author

Aaron Winborn

Aaron Winborn has been developing websites since the mid-90s. Beginning as a freelancer while teaching at a Sudbury school (a democratic and age-mixed model for young people), his clients demanded more and more features, until he (like everyone and their grandmother) realized he had built a full-featured content management system that required more work to develop and maintain than he was able in his spare time.

He realized at some point that somewhere in the world of Open Source, someone had to have created and released something to the community. Of course, the wonderful news was Drupal.

After converting the existing sites of his clients to Drupal, he continued learning and began to contribute back to the community. About this time, Advomatic, a company with similar interests and a commitment to the Drupal community, began expanding beyond the initial partners who formed it in the wake of Howard Dean’s presidential campaign of 2004. Aaron realized that his own goals of creating great sites with a team would be better matched there, and he was hired as their first employee.

Since that time, he has helped to develop some excellent sites, with clients such as Air America Radio, TPM Cafe, NRDC, Greenopia, Mountain News, Viacom, and Bioneers. He has also contributed several modules to Drupal, mostly stemming from his work with multimedia, including Embedded Media Field (for third-party Video, Audio, and Images), Views Slideshow (to create slide shows out of any content), and the RPG module (for online gaming, still in progress).

Drupal for Education and E-Learning (Paperback)

Drupal for Education and E-Learning (Paperback)$35.39

Product Description

In Detail

Social media in the classroom provide unique opportunities for teaching and learning. This book helps you break through the hype, and shows you how to build a site in Drupal that incorporates the Web in your class, on your terms, to achieve specific learning goals.

This book provides the essential details to get the most out of your Drupal site. In clear, step-by-step instructions, you will learn how to build a site that is easy to use, easy to navigate, and supports the teaching and learning you want to emphasize.

Drupal for Education and E-Learning provides a step-by-step overview of how to work with Drupal to build a feature-rich learning environment. In this book, you will learn how to configure the default Drupal installation, and how to extend your site to include social bookmarking, a podcasting and video sharing platform, image sharing, and interactive discussions around rich media content. You will also learn how to organize your site so that, as learning occurs over time, you and your students will be able to track their work history.

What you will learn from this book?

  • Drupal terminology and how Drupal works
  • How to build an intuitive structure to allow students and teachers to find relevant content
  • How to build an instructor blog to communicate with your students and also the larger school community
  • How to publish assignments for students in your courses, and how to track student responses to those assignments
  • Using roles, and role-based privileges, to support teaching and learning
  • Sharing learning resources using tags and bookmarks
  • How to set up a podcasting platform that allows podcasts to be aggregated in a variety of places, including iTunes, thus enabling students and teachers to share information with anyone at any time
  • How to set up informal working groups alongside classes to create a safe space for students to collaborate on class projects
  • How to develop your site using best practices, and maintain it safely and securely
  • Extending your site by installing contributed modules and themes
  • Setting up and using some of Drupal’s most popular modules: CCK, Views, and Organic Groups

Approach

The book focuses around creating educational activities in Drupal, with lots of examples of realistic courses and classroom ideas – and how to implement them.

Who this book is written for?

This book is for anybody looking to use Drupal to support teaching and learning; more generally, the examples given in this book can also be used by anybody looking to use Drupal to publish social media. This book is not a developer’s manual; you do NOT need to know code, or HTML, or CSS, to benefit from this book. People new to Drupal will find clear examples describing how to set up their site. More experienced Drupallers will find tips and tricks for extending their site, and step-by-step instructions on how to make the most out of Drupal’s flexibility.

About the Author

Bill Fitzgerald

Bill Fitzgerald was born in 1968, and worked as a teacher for 16 years. During that time, he taught English and History, and worked as a Technology Director at the K12 level. Bill began using technology in his own teaching in the early 90s; from there, he moved on to database design and systems administration. During that time, Bill began developing strategies to support technology integration in 1:1 laptop systems, and in desktop computing environments.

In 2003, Bill and Marc Poris founded FunnyMonkey, a Drupal development shop working primarily within education.

When Bill is not staring deeply into computer screens, he can be found riding his fixed gear bicycle through Portland, OR, or spending far too much time drinking coffee.

Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization (Paperback)

Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization (Paperback)$35.39

Product Description

Rank high in search engines with professional SEO tips, modules, and best practices for Drupal web sites

  • Concise, actionable steps for increasing traffic to your Drupal site
  • Learn which modules to install and how to configure them for maximum SEO results
  • Create search engine friendly and optimized title tags, paths, sitemaps, headings, navigation, and more
  • A practical, step-by-step guide that takes the mystery out of Drupal SEO

In Detail

The earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. Despite several advantages, many Drupal sites suffer with poor search engine standings. Perhaps you are aware of the importance of SEO for increasing traffic to your site, but do you know how to apply it to your Drupal site? Here comes the first book about search engine optimization for Drupal sites.

This practical, step-by-step guide takes the mystery out of Drupal search engine optimization (SEO) by showing you the tricks of today’s top marketing pros to achieve top ranking in the search engines. This isn’t a book of Drupal SEO theory – it’s a practical guide showing you which modules to install, which settings to use, and dozens of the most closely guarded "tricks of the trade" to get your web site optimized, higher in the search engines, and more profitable.

With this book and basic Drupal 6 knowledge – how to log in, create content, and install modules – you can build a perfectly search engine optimized web site. Each chapter uses easy, step-by-step instructions to walk you through the Drupal SEO modules, configurations, and content you will need to increase traffic on your web site. You start by reviewing the modules and tools that you should use to optimize your site, how to set up your analytics, and so on. Each subsequent chapter gives detailed instructions on implementing these features in Drupal. Later chapters cover topics like site organization, A/B testing, and automatic content tagging to maximize SEO and increase the conversion rate of your web site. When you have completed the book, you will have implemented the changes to your site required to rank well in the search engines. If you want to maximize the return on investment of your Drupal 6 web site and gain a significant advantage over competitors who are not using Drupal, then this book is for you. Imagine how great you’ll feel when your site is optimized to increase the number of visitors and convert them into paying customers.

What you will learn from this book?

Working through this book you will:

  • Explore 10 SEO mistakes you must avoid to achieve top ranking and increase traffic on your site
  • Get to grips with all the Drupal modules that are essential for SEO and may help your site rank well
  • Create page titles and paths that search engines (and users) will love
  • Learn about the 3 critical SEO problems that plague most Drupal sites and how to fix them
  • Optimize video, images, and other media in your Drupal site so that search engine spiders can read their content
  • Write content that users and the search engines will love and fix problems with duplicate content, robots.txt files, and .htaccess
  • Set up systems in Drupal to automatically tag and organize your content
  • Maximize the value of RSS, site speed, and Page rank in your Drupal site
  • Implement usability testing, A/B testing, and conversions best practices to turn visits into revenue for your business
  • Keep your site on a path of constant and never-ending improvement

Approach

This is a practical, hands-on book based around sound SEO techniques specifically applied to Drupal. Each chapter starts with a brief overview of the important concepts then quickly moves into practical step-by-step actions you can take immediately. Throughout the book, you’ll get clear instructions and detailed screenshots, so you can see exactly what to do each step of the way. You will install and configure a selection of Drupal modules – each of which will move you one step closer to optimization. Chapter-by-chapter, your Drupal site will become more optimized so that by the end of the book, your site is 100% ready for Google.

Who this book is written for?

This book is written for Drupal site owners and those who create Drupal sites including themers, developers, programmers, and consultants. A basic understanding of Drupal will be helpful: what a node is, how to create nodes, how to log in to the admin sections of your Drupal site, and how to properly install and enable a module. No knowledge of SEO will be assumed but a basic knowledge of search engines is expected.

About the Author

Benjamin Finklea

Benjamin Finklea is the founder and CEO of Drupal SEO firm Volacci Search Marketing. He is the creator of the Drupal SEO Checklist module and he contributes to other SEO-related modules in the Drupal community. Ben is an internationally-known consultant, speaker, and trainer on topics related to SEO, Drupal, and building successful high-tech businesses. He lives with his wife and sons near Austin, Texas

Drupal 7: Visual QuickStart Guide (Paperback)

Drupal 7: Visual QuickStart Guide (Paperback)$19.79

Product Description

The free and open-source package Drupal is one of the most user-friendly and popular web content management systems (CMSes) available. Sites built on it are highly visible and include The Onion and Amnesty International. Its web-based interface allows those with little or no experience to create professional-looking sites quickly while its flexibility gives them access to such features as blogs, polls, and forums.

This Visual QuickStart uses plenty of screen shots and step-by-step instructions to walk a reader through the process of building a site using Drupal. It starts with installation and initial configuration, discusses content and user management in depth, and concludes with ways to improve your new site's appearance and interactivity.

About the Author

Tom Geller (Oberlin, OH) is a full-time freelance writer whose recent clients have included Apple, IEEE, ACM, Nature.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, Safari Books Online, and Lynda.com.

Drupal E-commerce with Ubercart 2.x (Paperback)

Drupal E-commerce with Ubercart 2.x (Paperback)$31.57

Product Description

Build, administer, and customize an online store using Drupal with Ubercart

  • Create a powerful e-shop using the award-winning CMS Drupal and the robust e-commerce module Ubercart
  • Create and manage the product catalog and insert products in manual or batch mode
  • Apply SEO (search engine optimization) to your e-shop and adopt turn-key internet marketing techniques
  • Implement advanced techniques like cross-selling, product comparison, coupon codes, and segmented pricing
  • A step-by-step tutorial with an example-oriented approach with many screenshots to guide you through the book seamlessly

In Detail
Ubercart is an exciting open source e-commerce package that fully integrates your online store with Drupal. Ubercart leverages the advantages of Drupal’s major core and contributed systems, providing your users with shopping cart functionality that integrates with other parts of your company or community web site. It can be used to sell shippable goods, downloadable products, recurring memberships, and event tickets, and to enable complex interactions with Drupal through various add-on contributions.

This book guides you through the process of creating, administrating and marketing an online store, providing information and tips for raising your sales and your customer support. It will also show you how to maintain and add advanced capabilities to your company’s eShop.

If you are a merchant wanting to invest your precious time to update the online presence of your company, or a web site designer wanting to expand your business and offer innovative solutions to your clients, this book has been written for you. You don’t need any programming experience to install and customize your electronic store. The procedure is well structured and easy and all we ask you to do is to follow some simple steps in order to complete some specific tasks in each chapter. The book will guide you through the installation and configuration of Drupal and Ubercart. From there it will cover specific areas like managing orders, customizing the frontend and user interface. At the end it covers the advanced topics of internet marketing techniques and Search Engine Optimization.

When you reach the end of the book, you’ll have a working store and you’ll have obtained all the required knowledge to customize it to your specific needs.

What you will learn from this book

  • Organize your store catalog with categories and subcategories, or with user generated free tagging to use the power of folksonomy.
  • Create products and product kits with a plethora of available information and multiple attributes.
  • Skip the time-consuming process of manually importing products by directly transferring from information from external files.
  • Create shipping quotes and connect your store with the biggest transport companies, like UPS or the United States Postal Service.
  • Create and manage simple or more complex tax rates.
  • Learn how to accept payments in as many ways as possible, and connect your store with payment gateways like Paypal or Google Checkout.
  • Manage your orders and your customers. Integrate with CiviCRM and put the customer at the heart of your business.
  • Track your store activities and sales and generate useful reports.
  • Use newsletters, forums, twitter, and corporate blogging to create a community around your products.
  • Transform any template or design in an Ubercart Theme and create a unique frontend.
  • Make your store more competitive and suggest new products to your clients with product recommendation systems, or cross-selling.
  • Enhance the user interface, improve the shopping cart, and manage prices and discounts.
  • Use Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing techniques to boost your traffic, but learn at the same time how to improve the performance and security of your store.

Approach
This book will take you through the basics, like Drupal and Ubercart installation and common settings, and as we proceed through the chapters, we’ll implement more advanced techniques.

Whether you know Drupal or not, this book will be your guide to creating a powerful e-commerce web site.

Who this book is written for
If you are a business owner wanting to create an eCommerce website for your company or to upgrade a company eShop to be easier to maintain and have advanced e-shopping capabilities, then this book is meant for you. You don’t need any programming experience to use this book.

About the Author

George Papadongonas
George Papadongonas is the owner of a small web development firm, located in Athens, Greece. He started his career as a freelancer web developer in 2000 and works with small and medium size enterprises. He has experience in many development platforms, but felt in love with Drupal in 2007 and with Ubercart in 2008. He is a member of Drupal Association and an active supporter of the open source community.

Yiannis Doxaras
Yiannis Doxaras has studied theoretical physics at University of Athens and University of Cambridge. He is co-founder of OSIS, a Greek open source startup company that provides turn-key solutions in industries like travel, e-learning, and e-government. Yiannis is an active committer in various open source projects mainly with Java, Python and PHP technologies. He is a serial entrepreneur and innovation broken in Greece and the Balkans.

Beginning Drupal 7 (Paperback)

Beginning Drupal 7 (Paperback)$31.49

Product Description

This book focuses on the nontechnical user who is responsible for building, maintaining, and managing Drupal web sites. The book covers why you should consider using Drupal when building a new web site, what Drupal is, installing and configuring Drupal, creating and managing content, managing users, adding functionality to your web site through Drupal modules, and more advanced topics on using themes, panels, and views. By reading this book, you will:

  • Understand why you should use Drupal and the power of the platform.
  • Quickly build confidence in your ability to use Drupal.
  • Gain the knowledge necessary to build, deploy, and manage web sites of moderate complexity on Drupal 7.

What you’ll learn

  • What Drupal is and why you should use it
  • How to install a basic Drupal web site from scratch
  • How to create content in your new Drupal web site
  • How to manage users on your new Drupal web site
  • How to change the look and feel of your new Drupal web site through themes
  • How to install and configure modules

Who this book is for

This book is for nontechnical users who need to use Drupal to manage content, as well as PHP developers who are new to Drupal.

Drupal 6 Attachment Views (Paperback)

Drupal 6 Attachment Views (Paperback)$43.87

Product Description

This is a fun, informative, hands-on learning guide. It uses a real case study in an interactive and informal manner, and presents examples that continue to build on each other. Clear, concise instructions and practical examples mean you can learn quickly how to increase the functionality and value of your web site. If you are a Drupal developer of any level and you are waiting to explore Attachment Views, then this book is for you.

Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, and Community Websites: How to setup, configure and customise this powerful PHP/MySQL based Open Source CMS (Paperback)

Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, and Community Websites: How to setup, configure and customise this powerful PHP/MySQL based Open Source CMS (Paperback)$31.57

Product Description

How to setup, configure and customise this powerful PHP/MySQL based Open Source CMS

  • Install, configure, administer, maintain and extend Drupal.
  • Control access with users, roles and permissions
  • Structure your content using Drupal’s powerful CMS features
  • Includes coverage of release 4.7

In Detail

Drupal is one of the most popular content management systems on the internet. Based on PHP/MySQL, its power and flexibility combined with its exceptional design mean it is already on the way to becoming the de facto standard for CMS Websites. Drupal’s modular design and structured source code make it both highly flexible and easily extended and modified. Drupal is extremely scalable, making it ideal for both a simple personal website as well as an industrial strength commercial or institutional web presence.

Drupal is a model open source project in that it has a large, friendly community of people who contribute to the project in various ways. Drupal is not only free and easy to use, but this community provides on going mutual support.

Drupal’s power means choosing an initial pathway can be daunting. The flexibility and power of its content management features mean the right approach needs to be taken. This book takes you from initial set up through site design and creation in a series of carefully structured steps. While there are a few advanced topics that are beyond the scope of the book, all of the core stages of creating a website using Drupal are covered in detail.

What you will learn from this book?

Chapter 1 introduces you to the world of Drupal and looks at where Drupal comes from, where its going and what it can offer you. Because it is important to understand the nature of the tasks which lie ahead, it also discusses how to plan and build your website, taking a sneak preview of the book’s demo Website in the process. Finally, we scrutinize the Drupal community and learn how to make the most of Drupal as an organized, living entity and not just a piece of software.

Chapter 2 deals with how to get everything you need up and running on a development machine and also briefly looks at how all the requisite technologies gel together to produce your working Drupal site. Once everything is up and running, and after looking over some of the more common installation problems, the chapter presents a short tour of Drupal in order to give you an idea of what to expect.

Chapter 3 looks at the most general settings which all Drupal administrators need to contend with. Everything from determining your site’s name to dealing with the cache or file system settings gets treated here before we look at more focused and complex issues in the chapters to come.

Chapter 4 sees us adding functionality to the newly created site. The focus of this chapter is really on modules and how they can be added and enabled, or even how to obtain modules that are not part of the standard distribution. Since blocks are often required to display the functionality provided by modules, this chapter ends off with a discussion on how to control blocks.

Chapter 5 concerns itself with the topic of access control. Drupal has a sophisticated role based access control system, which is fundamentally important for controlling how users access your site. This chapter will give you the information you need to implement whatever access controls you require.

Chapter 6 gets to the heart of the matter by beginning the book’s coverage on content. Working with content, what content types are available, administering content and even a discourse on some of the more common content related modules serve as a basis for moving to more advanced content related matters that follow in the next chapter.

Chapter 7 gives you the edge when it comes to creating engaging and dynamic content. While this chapter doesn’t require you to be an expert in HTML, PHP and CSS it does introduce you to the basics and shows how, with a little knowledge, extremely powerful and professional content can be created. That’s only half the story, because later on it looks at categorization and how this particular feature of Drupal sets it apart from everything else out there.

Chapter 8 gives you a run down of how attractive interfaces are created in Drupal through the use of themes. As well as discussing briefly some of the considerations that must be taken into account when planning your website, it ends off by looking at how to make important modifications to your chosen theme.

Chapter 9 really adds the icing on the cake by looking at a host of more advanced topics. From creating flexible content types and generating revenue from ads, all the way through to building dynamic content using Ajax, you will find something to enhance your website and add that something special.

Chapter 10 takes a pragmatic look at the type of tasks you will need to be proficient in in order to successfully run and maintain a Drupal site. Whether its setting up cron jobs or making backups of your database, everything you need to do throughout the course of running your newly created website will be covered here.

Appendix A deals with the all important topic of deployment. Because all major work should be done on a copy of your Website on a development machine, this appendix presents a sound process for taking the finished product and making it available for public consumption on your host site.

Who this book is written for?

This book will suit anyone who has a need to create a content rich website. Whether you are:

  • Adding a personal web page
  • Building a forum
  • Writing a collaborative book
  • Retailing goods
  • Creating a blog
  • Launching a community Website

This book will prove to be an indispensable companion. Both experts and beginners to computing alike will find the information contained herein to be accessible and easy to intuit.

About the Author

David Mercer

David Mercer was born in August 1976 in Harare, Zimbabwe. Having always had a strong interest in science, David came into regular contact with computers at university where he graduated cum laude with majors in applied math and math (although he minored in computer science).

As a programmer and professional writer who has been writing both code and books for about nine years, he has worked on a number of well known titles, in various capacities, on a wide variety of topics. His books have sold tens of thousands of copies and have been translated into over 6 different languages to date.

David finds that the challenges arising from the dichotomous relationship between the science (and art) of software programming and the art (and science) of writing is what keeps his interest in producing books piqued. He will no doubt continue to write professionally in the future.

David balances his time between programming, reviewing, writing, and contributing to interesting web-based projects such as RankTracer and LinkDoozer. When he isn’t working (which isn’t that often) he enjoys playing guitar (generally on stage and unrehearsed) and getting involved in outdoor activities ranging from touch rugby and golf to water skiing and snowboarding. Visit RankTracer or find him on LinkDoozer where he is generally lurking.

Foundation Drupal 7: Learn how to use the Drupal framework to quickly build feature-rich web sites (Paperback)

Foundation Drupal 7: Learn how to use the Drupal framework to quickly build feature-rich web sites (Paperback)$26.39

Product Description

Drupal can significantly decrease the amount of time it takes to code a feature-rich web site, for free. Drupal is a content management platform that can power all kinds of web sites—from simple online brochures to more advanced sites that include social networking, blogs, e-commerce, and business portals. It is free, open source software that allows anyone to quickly and easily build web sites.

Its full range of modules—including user permissions, security mechanisms, JavaScript menus, WYSIWYG editors, and more—helps create the foundation for a powerful web site. Combined with its templating system (and a few tips and tricks), any graphic design file can be used to create a Drupal web site.

This book covers everything you need to build Drupal-powered web sites quickly. It explains in simple terms how Drupal works, and it provides concepts, tips, and code snippets for every step of the development process. A 200-plus page reference manual and cookbook is included.

  • Helps web designers of all technical abilities create Drupal-powered web sites from start to finish
  • Gives an overview of Drupal concepts and several contributed modules necessary to understand and leverage Drupal
  • Describes the process of building and hosting Drupal web sites, including server administration, design tips, theming, system updates, and more

What you’ll learn

  • How to get started using Drupal 7 and reduce the amount of time it takes to code a feature-rich web site
  • How Drupal works, including best practices to quickly integrate Drupal into every web site you design
  • How to configure a server and manage multiple web sites and testing environments using popular server administration software (cPanel) and a code repository (Subversion)
  • How to place Photoshop or Illustrator design files on a Drupal content management system (CMS)
  • How to create a foundational CMS that can be used across multiple web sites
  • How to use popular Drupal modules, web site recipes, code snippets, and more

Who is this book for?

The primary audience for this book is web site designers throughout the world interested in using Drupal to build web sites. The audience may have previous experience using Drupal but do not consider themselves proficient. They are familiar with coding a basic HTML/CSS web site, although these skills are not required to benefit from the book.

The secondary audience for this book is freelance Drupal developers who actively use Drupal to build web sites. They are proficient developers interested in reducing development time and learning Drupal best practices.

About the Author

R.J. Townsend is a graphic designer, computer programmer, and entrepreneur with eight years experience using web-based technologies to automate research programs and work processes. He started Cultivate Marketing Technologies LLC in 2007 focusing on web applications for small businesses and most recently started CodeMyDesigns.com providing Drupal content management systems for graphic designers. He earned his master’s degree in research psychology from California State University, Fullerton and is currently working towards his MBA at the University of Delaware. He has published several articles on integrating research and technology and won an award for his research in 2004.

Drupal Website Models (Paperback)

Drupal Website Models (Paperback)$29.85

Product Description

This book advises on how to build different types of websites and especially in Drupal framework.

Drupal 7: A Beginner’s Guide (Beginner’s Guide (Osborne Mcgraw Hill)) (Paperback)

Drupal 7: A Beginner’s Guide (Beginner’s Guide  (Osborne Mcgraw Hill)) (Paperback)$26.39

Product Description

A hands-on guide to building websites and applications in Drupal

This fast-paced tutorial explains, step-by-step, how to build highly functional websites and applications using the popular and powerful open-source software Drupal. Timed for the newest release, Drupal 7, the book helps you get started very quickly while teaching you many of the more advanced capabilities along the way.

Drupal: A Beginner’s Guide helps you get your great ideas to the Web at minimal cost and effort. You’ll be able to build a site framework that has total flexibility and slick aesthetics. The book also includes plenty of tips for easy, do-it-yourself website maintenance.

About the Author

Ray West is a CIO, programmer and author with over 12 years experience in web development creating database and content management systems. He is the author of numerous books on web development and is the founder of CommunityMX.com and TODCon (The Online Developer’s Conference).