Chapters & Authors of the Definitive Guide to Drupal 7
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Definitive Guide to Drupal 7
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.
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PART 5: Module Development
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18 — 18. Introduction to Module Development
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.
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23 — 23. Introduction to Functional Testing with Simpletest
Learn how to write tests for your module, an essential part of reliable and sustainable code.
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22 — 22. Writing Project-Specific Modules
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.
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21 — 21. Porting modules to Drupal 7
Port a Drupal 6 module to Drupal 7, a great way to learn module development.
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24 — 24. Writing a Major Module
Look at the concept of an API module and go into some of the strategy of writing these building blocks of Drupal functionality.
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19 — 19. Using Drupal's API in a Module
Using hooks and other basic API to get things done.
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20 — 20. Refining Your Module
- Create a configuration page and settings form.
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PART 1: Getting Started
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1 — 1. First Steps: Building a Drupal 7 site
Build a complete site in the first chapter. Go from zero to sixty miles per hour (or one hundred kilometers per hour, as the case may be) in 27 pages.
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2 — 2. Essential Tools: Drush and Git
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.
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PART 6: Advanced Site Building
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27 — 27. API-Driven Development and Scaling
The concepts and practice of using Drupal's pluggable caching and storage mechanisms to scale to
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29 — 29. The Menu System and the Path into Drupal
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.
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28 — 28. Spice Up Your Content with Tasty Semantics
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.)
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25 — 25 Drupal Commerce
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.
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32 — 32. User Experience
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.
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34 — 34. Drupal Distributions and Installation Profiles
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.
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30 — 30. Under the Hood: Inside Drupal When It Displays a Page
Follow Drupal through what it does during a page request, a perfect follow-up to Chapter 29 and a great approach to truly understanding Drupal.
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26 — 26. Drush
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.
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33 — 33. Completing a Site: The Other 90%
Take on advanced configuration and lots of glue code – whatever it takes – to complete the DefinitiveDrupal.org site built out in Chapters 1 and 8.
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31 — 31. Search and Apache Solr Integration
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.
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PART 4: Front End Development
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15 — 15. Theming
Take a thorough tour of using Drupal's theming system to change the look and feel of your site.
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17 — 17. jQuery
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.
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16 — 16. Advanced Theming
By the time you finish this chapter you'll know how to work with variables in preprocess function
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PART 7: Community
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37 — 37. Maintaining a project
Maintain a project shared with the world on Drupal.org and make use of the Git revision control system.
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38 — 38. Contributing to the Community
Contribute to Drupal to make the software you work with, and the community you work in, better. And, perhaps, help make the world better.
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35 — 35. Drupal's Story: A Chain of Many Unexpected Events
Follow the story of Drupal's beginnings as an open source project through some key events to its development into the thriving community it is today.
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36 — 36. Now You're in Business: Making a Living with Drupal
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.
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APPENDIX
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B — B. Profiling Drupal and Optimizing Performance
Profile Drupal to identify, and so be able to fix, performance bottlenecks.
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C — C. Page Rendering and Altering
Learn about the rendering system, or Render API, one of the major innovations in Drupal 7, and what how it can benefit your site building.
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A — A. Upgrading a Drupal site from 6 to 7
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.
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I — I. Setting Up a Drupal Environment with the Acquia Dev Desktop
Be up and running fast with Drupal using a cross-platform Drupal stack installer.
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F — F. Windows Development Environment
Get Drupal up and running on Windows, and get started with Windows-based tools for working with Drupal.
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D — D. Visual Design in Drupal
Approach graphical design for a site from a Drupal perspective and make your life easier!
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H — H. Mac OS X Installation
Install Drupal on Mac OS X with MAMP.
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E — E. Accessibility
See Drupal's accessibility enhancements and learn what practices to follow and what resources to use to make your site accessible to all.
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G — G Installing Drupal on Ubuntu
Run Drupal on Ubuntu— and run Ubuntu on a virtual machine if you want to use this popular Linux variant for Drupal development.
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PART 2: Site Building Foundations
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4 — 4. There's A Module For That
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.
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5 — 5. Organic Groups
The Organic Groups suite of modules gives people the power to organize content and themselves on
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7 — 7. Updating Drupal
Follows up on the security chapter with several approaches to keeping Drupal core and contributed modules up-to-date.
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3 — 3. Building Dynamic Pages Using Views
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.
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8 — 8. Extending Your Site
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.
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6 — 6. Security in Drupal
Learn security practices and ways to keep your site secure, from configuration to evaluating - and even - writing code.
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PART 3: Making Your Life Easier
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14 — 14 .Developing from a Human Mindset
Attain joy from your code and contributions by removing obstacles and putting the flow in workflow.
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9 — 9. Getting Help and Getting Involved
Perhaps the most important thing in the book, this chapter helps you find great ways to engage with the Drupal community.
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10 — 10. Planning and Managing a Drupal Project
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.
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11 — 11. Documenting for End Users and the Production Team
Document your work for clients and colleagues, because your work is useful to the extent it is understood by others.
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12 — 12. Development Environment
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.
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13 — 13. Putting Your Site Online, Staging and Deployment
Get your site online, and then tackle adding features while users actively use and add content to the site.
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BONUS
On-line only chapters, appendices, resources, and follow-ups worthy of more than a resource page
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J — Building a Superstar's Site
See the online companion to Appendix A: Upgrading a Site from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 for corrections and clarifications to that Appendix.
Continue the upgrade of AnjaliForberPratt.com begun in Appendix A to build out a site worthy of a superstar.
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K — Vim
Use the Vim text editor.
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N — Integrated Development Environments
This online-only appendix will feature a survey of available IDEs, and a little bit about how to
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L — Localization and Internationalization
Resources for translating your site's user interface and content.
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M — Content Administrator Convenience
Managing content and comments can be much of the day-to-day usage of a content management system.