The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7

The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 is the most comprehensive book for building web sites using the powerful and extensible Drupal content management framework.

Written by active community members and contributors (some of the "brightest and most innovative minds in the Drupal community," to quote Angela Byron, Drupal 7 maintainer), the Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 covers the basics then quickly advances to in-depth exploration of the functionality and tools that make Drupal so powerful for building web applications. Just as important, this book provides the reader with a guide to participating in the Drupal community: an international, committed, rapidly growing community of themers, developers, and open source advocates who write the modules, test the code, and work ceaselessly to make Drupal great. The release of Drupal 7, with its dramatic improvements in usability and system architecture, will take Drupal to a new level of popularity, and this book will help give you the foundation and scaffolding to grow with Drupal.

With The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7, you will be able to:

• Plan and build a complete Drupal site with core alone.
• Extend Drupal's functionality by selecting from thousands of modules.
• Make your Drupal site look like anything you want with theming and jQuery.
• Extend Drupal by coding your own modules.
• Install Drupal in many environments.
• Use essential tools such as Drush and Git to make your life easier.
• Contribute to the Drupal community as an organizer or a coder.

Who this book is for Anyone who is serious about getting better at Drupal.
Table of Contents

1. Building a Drupal 7 Site
2. Essential Tools: Drush and Git 
3. Building Dynamic Pages Using Views
4. There's a Module for That
5. Creating Community Web Sites with Organic Groups
6. Security in Drupal
7. Updating Drupal
8. Extending Your Site
9. Drupal Community: Getting Help and Getting Involved 
10. Planning and Managing a Drupal Project
11. Documenting for End Users and the Production Team
12. Development Environment
13. Putting a Site Online and Deploying New Features 
14. Developing from a Human Mindset
15. Theming
16. Advanced Theming
17. jQuery
18. Introduction to Module Development
19. Using Drupal's APIs in a Module
20. Refining Your Module
21. Porting Modules to Drupal 7
22. Writing Project-Specific Code
23. Introduction to Functional Testing with Simpletest
24. Writing a Major Module
25. Drupal Commerce
26. Drush
27. Scaling Drupal
28. Spice Your Content Up with Tasty Semantics
29. The Menu System and the Path Into Drupal
30. Under the Hood: Inside Drupal When It Displays a Page
31. Search and Apache Solr Integration
32. User Experience
33. Completing a Site: The Other 90%
34. Drupal Distributions and Installation Profiles
35. Drupal's Story: A Chain of Many Unexpected Events
36. Now You're in Business: Making a Living with Drupal
37. Maintaining a Project
38. Contributing to the Community
39. Appendix A: Updating a Drupal Site from 6 to 7
40. Appendix B: Profiling Drupal and Optimizing Performance
41. Appendix C: Page Rendering and Altering 
42. Appendix D: Visual Design in Drupal
43. Appendix E: Accessibility
44. Appendix F: Windows Development Environment
45. Appendix G: Installing Drupal on Ubuntu
46. Appendix H: Mac OS X Installation
47. Appendix I: Setting Up a Drupal Environment with the Acquia Dev Desktop

Authors

1. Benjamin Melançon
2. Jacine Luisi
3. Károly Négyesi
4. Greg Anderson
5. Bojhan Somers
6. Stéphane Corlosquet
7. Stefan Freudenberg
8. Michelle Lauer
9. Ed Carlevale
10. Florian Lorétan
11. Dani Nordin
12. Ryan Szrama
13. Susan Stewart
14. Jake Strawn
15. Brian Travis
16. Dan Hakimzadeh
17. Amye Scavarda
18. Albert Albala
19. Allie Micka
20. Robert Douglass
21. Robin Monks
22. Roy Scholten
23. Peter Wolanin
24. Kay VanValkenburgh
25. Greg Stout
26. Kasey Qynn Dolin
27. Forest Mars
28. Sam Boyer
29. Mike Gifford
30. Claudina Sarahe
31. George Cassie
32. Mike Ryan
33. Dmitri Gaskin

Benjamin Melançon builds web sites to give people a little more power over their online presence.  He loves his work, but seeks to build ways to connect people for planning and coordination that will help us all gain a lot more power in our lives.

Jacine Luisi (neé Rodriguez) is a front-end developer, specializing in Drupal theme development. She spends much of her free time working on markup and CSS related issues for Drupal core and also works on contributed projects such as the Skinr module and the Sky theme.  She is the HTML5 initiative leader for Drupal 8.

Károly Négyesi, since his life became hopelessly entangled with Drupal in 2004, has risen to be one of the most prolific core contributors and had a brief stint as the first leader of the security team.

Greg Anderson is one of the co-maintainers of drush, the Drupal shell. He runs the Developer Technical Support Group in the Americas for Ricoh Corporation.


Bojhan Somers has been involved with the Drupal community, helping form the UX team and taking a leading role in bringing user experience changes to the core software.


Stéphane Corlosquet holds a master's degree specializing in Semantic Web from the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), Ireland. He works at the Mass General Hospital Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease (MIND) on a Drupal-based distribution to build online communities of researchers in biomedecine.


Stefan Freudenberg is a backend developer with experience in Linux system administration. Drawn into developing websites with Drupal and into the community in late 2008, his debugging and profiling skills make him popular with his teams. Arguing for simpler architecture and standards compliance is what he enjoys most but is not always as well received.


Michelle Lauer (aka miche on Drupal.org) started her Drupal adventures in 2006 and quickly became known for combining a keen sense of detail while possessing the ability to see the big picture.