Benjamin builds web sites to give people a little more power over their online presence. He strives to build ways to connect people for planning and coordination that will help us all gain a lot more power in the rest of our lives.
Benjamin Melançon
-
1. First Steps: Building a Drupal 7 site
Build a Drupal 7 site from planning through to giving people the privilege of posting pages and other content, with lots of key concepts covered and tips given along the way. Building this site is continued in Chapters 8 and 33.
-
4. There's A Module For That
A tour of some of the many modules available for Drupal 7, and how to find and evaluate the ones you need.
-
9. Getting Help and Getting Involved
[This is a draft of the chapter that appears in its final form in the book. Watch this space, because the version in the book may become the draft of what we post here!]
Drupal: come for the software, stay for the community.
— Dries Buytaert, Drupal founder
-
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.
Drupal is a powerful and modular system— we've heard that before. Indeed, much of Drupal's power is in its modules, dynamos of pluggable functionality that can build on Drupal's base system and on one another to do wonderful things.
-
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.
This extended serialized chapter will chronicle the continuing build of the site which received a basic upgrade in Appendix A. The site is AnjaliFP.com (not upgraded yet!).
-
2. Essential Tools: Drush and Git
This chapter introduces two essential tools in the life of any Drupalista: Drush, the Drupal Shell which makes many tasks in Drupal much faster and easier; and Git, a distributed version control system which allows you to experiment freely with your code— and to collaborate with people around the world.
-
7. Updating Drupal
This chapter is about updating Drupal 7 core— note that means staying within Drupal 7. Appendix A covers upgrading a Drupal 6 site to Drupal 7 if that’s what you need to do. There is a very large difference. A major version upgrade such as Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 will require updating all your modules to be compatible with the version you are upgrading to, your custom theme will need changes, and it will in general take a lot of work to get a complex site working well again. You don't have to worry about any of that here.
-
38. Contributing to the Community
Contribute to Drupal with time, money, and love; help build the movement.
Online resources
Credits not in the chapter:
Justin Randall (beejeebus in IRC) suggested soliciting reviews for your projects on a relevant groups.drupal.org group (if any).
-
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.
-
24. Writing a Major Module
Also known as Module Development Strategy or the AJAX Form Messages module chapter...
This chapter will have lots of post-publication updates, so we encourage you to sign up for updates.
- How not to build a module
- Keeping API and UI separate
- Making our module modular
- Making our module exportable
- Making use of other modules