Tired of reading on screen already? Go right over to Amazon.com to order the book (or .co.uk, .de or .fr).
What knowledge is this? Well, I've divided the book into three parts, covering 13 chapters.
Part A – Drupal basics
This section contains basic management of a Drupal site, and explains things that should be bread-and-butter for developers (assuming you're used to Drupal 7) – but could be really good read for site editors and people new to Drupal. Part A contains:
- Nodes. Create, edit and administer content on your site.
- Users and permissions. Manage users on your site, and give them access to do what they should – but not more.
- Blocks. Get a grip in how Drupal regions work, and how you can use them to display related information in sidebars and other places.
- Menus. A short chapter, helping you understand and handle menus and menu links.
- Other basic Drupal knowledge. While not something that editors usually need to worry about, it is still good to know about things like text formats, clearing cache and managing the shortcuts on your site.
Part B – information structure
This chapter is the really really essential one for Drupal developers – meaning coders and site builders – but also essential for themers, project managers, designers, and anyone else involved in Drupal development. If you understand how information architecture work in Drupal, you can work with Drupal rather than against it, and sail on the power of the best web publishing system on the planet. This part contains:
- Fields. Oh, boy. Fields are the atoms of your information structure, and the possibility to add fields to not only nodes but also user accounts, comments and taxonomy terms is so powerful that it is dangerous.
- Taxonomy. This rather short chapter explains how taxonomy in Drupal works, and how you can leverage its functionality for categorizing information pieces on your site.
- View modes and field display. This chapter show you how to control how entity fields are displayed – including how to manage images and image styles.
- Views basics. Bigger than all the previous chapters, this chapter introduces the Views module – the most used of all Drupal modules. The chapter will show you how to create views to list content on your site in different ways, such as blocks to place on other pages, or stand-alone pages to add to your site.
- Advanced Views configuration. This is where the fun starts. Creating lists with Views is a good thing, but when you start tweaking and manipulating these lists you can in just a few minutes that would take days of development work in other frameworks. Not least, contextual filters – covered in depth in this chapter – will help you build lists that are sensitive to the context where they are used and will adjust its content accordingly.
Now honestly, I wouldn't say that everyone involved in a Drupal project needs to master advanced Views configuration. But if a project manager at least knows what kind of things can be done with Views, then she can help bringing more useful stuff to the client and at the same time decrease the development hours. Really.
Part C – other essential modules
This part of the book covers three (or actually four) additional Drupal projects that I consider all Drupal developers should know. These modules are useful in nearly all Drupal projects I have seen, and any Drupal developer ignoring any of these modules will spend time reinventing the wheel. I am not kidding.
The projects covered in this part of the book are:
- Flag. Being the least complex of the three modules, Flag is used to add an additional layer of both information – one/zero markings on content, comments and users – and events – people setting or removing flags. Combine with Views (above) or Rules (below) for full effect.
- Rules. The Rules framework is used for setting up custom actions on your site, which could mean sending e-mails, chaning values of entity fields, displaying messages, and much more. It is also used for having these actions being carried out when selected events on your site occur, and setting up simple or complex conditions that allow or prevent these actions. The chapter also covers Rules Scheduler, allowing you to have actions carried out at selected times.
- Page manager. The Page manager and Panels modules give you the final steps in controlling contextual information on your site. In particular in combination with Views content panes – also covered in this chapter – you will have tools that increase Drupal's flexibility and power many times over.
What else?
But wait, there is more!
The first appendix in the book cover things like installing Drupal, and extending Drupal with new modules and themes – including guidelines when comparing and selecting modules. It also has an extensive section about exporting configuration to code, which should be a part of any professional Drupal development.
The second appendix covers language management in Drupal, including localization – getting Drupal in your own language – and internationalization – having your Drupal site in several languages at once.
Last, but not least, I also want to mention the exercises included in this book. I have spent quite some time building exercises that readers can try themselves, to get practical skills in the topics covered in each chapter. In the first part of the book, the exercisese are short (but many) tasks, usually issued by a fictive Boss. In the two latter parts contain exercises that are full-fledged user stories – described with screenshots, descriptions, demonstration instructions, and complemented with step-by-step suggested solutions and often extra comments.
While recording screencasts is really fun, I am very happy that I have gotten this opportunity to gather what I consider being essential Drupal 7 knowledge in a single book. I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Interested? Go right over to Amazon.com to order the book (or .co.uk, .de or .fr).
(A special thanks goes to Matts Hildén at NodeOne, for an extrordinary job in getting the digital manuscript to a printed book. Thank you.)