The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 accelerates people along the Drupal learning curve by covering all aspects of doing Drupal: site building and development, running projects sustainably, and participating in the community. The primary focus is on building sites with Drupal 7, bringing in all the knowledge this requires: of configuration, available modules, theming, project management, and ultimately advanced development.
Whether building sites, developing themes or modules, or trying to make a Drupal distribution that can drive your car, Drush (the Drupal shell) and Git (an open source version control system) will help you get where you are going quickly and safely.
Take a journey of thorough understanding through the most important contributed project Drupal has: Views. Most if not all sites you build will rely on the Views module for the powerful ways it provides to list, filter, and sort content.
Take a tour of some of the many other modules (bundles of functionality) available from the Drupal community which you may want to use. More importantly, learn how to find and evaluate modules to meet your site-building needs.
Set up fields, views, and chosen contributed modules to showcase authors, present a table of contents, connect authors and resources to chapters, and allow visitors to participate. This continues the site build begun in the first chapter and gives a taste of how far you can go in Drupal without writing any code.
Lay out your goals, clearly define what you need, set yourself up to be able to tackle a large project in small chunks- and get other solid advice on the necessary practice of planning and managing projects.
When you start a project of any sort, you set up a development environment: you choose tools and create spaces that define your processes and either limit or advance your efforts. This chapter is all about getting your computer set up to be of most help to you in configuring and coding your projects.
Learn another key part of front-end development, enhancing site visitor experience with JavaScript, and in particular the powerful and relatively easy-to-use, even fun, JQuery library.
Chapters 18, 19, and 20 form one unit, originally written as one chapter, covering everything you need to know to get started writing your own modules.
These chapters cover the basics of a module and how Drupal uses hooks in nearly everything it does to allow modules to extend and modify Drupal. (We will also explain what hooks are.) You will receive an overview of technical skills required to develop a module and instruction and examples for using the hooks and functions provided by Drupal in the course of building a complete module. Finally, you will look at the refinement of a Drupal.org-worthy module, including fixing errors and reviewing for coding standards.
Another good onramp to writing modules is "glue code", site-specific modules to make the final tweaks you cannot quite achieve with configuration. This chapter can be read without reading the previous chapters first.
Build an online store and go inside the decisionmaking of the ground-up re-architecture of Ubercart (the number one e-commerce suite for Drupal 6) for Drupal 7 as Drupal Commerce. This chapter is valuable to any person building a commerce site, but it also invites you into the Commerce developer community.
Get insight into advanced Drush usage to revolutionize your site developing experience as much as using Drush, Drupal's command-line shell, did when you started using it in the first place. You can even start writing your own Drush scripts and commands.
Bring the power of the Semantic Web to Drupal, and vice versa— making data on your web site linked to precise meanings that computers can understand and connect to data elsewhere on the Internet. (SEO hint: Computers include search engines.)
Drupal's versatile and easily understood architecture sets the stage for wide community involvement, as exemplified by Drupal's menu system— responsible for associating paths on a Drupal site with just what the site returns to the visitor. Understand this routing system, critical background for module developers and site builders alike.
Use and extend the Solr module for much more powerful search capabilities. This chapter also provides an example of integrating Drupal with a web service and making use of object-oriented code.
Take an in-depth look at user experience improvements in Drupal 7 and the decisions behind them, and how you can use new best practices and consistent interface design decisions in your own development.
Look at some popular Drupal distributions – packaged collections of Drupal and modules to serve specific purposes, which are spreading Drupal like never before – and learn how to make your own distributions with Drupal's installation profile capability.
Make a living with Drupal! Take a hard look at problems with Drupal software— and come up with ways you can mutually sustain your success and Drupal's success.
Upgrade Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 by encapsulating all essential steps in code, so that the live content is preserved. Take a look at data migration, an alternative approach to upgrading that also works when moving from a non-Drupal site.