“Even if you’re already a seasoned Drupal user of CCK, Views, or Panels, I’ve no doubt that this book will provide you with several new techniques and methods for getting the most out of these extremely essential modules. It certainly has for me.”
—Dries Buytaert, founder and project lead of Drupal, and CTO of Acquia
With Drupal, Web professionals can create full-featured Web sites with just a few clicks. Drupal’s core is compact and well documented, but much of Drupal’s immense power lies elsewhere—in external modules.Drupal’s Building Blocks is an authoritative tutorial, reference, and cookbook for Drupal’s most valuable modules.
The authors are Drupal insiders who’ve spent years creating and supporting these modules—Earl Miles, developer of the Views and Panels modules, and Lynette Miles, Drupal documentation team member. They’ve brought together indispensable information you won’t find anywhere else, as well as extensive sample “recipe” code designed for easy adaptation and reuse. Learn how to
Use Content Construction Kit (CCK) to customize your data input forms around your needs
Improve site flexibility with Drupal’s node system
Add optional field types, including PHP-based fields
Customize themes to display data more attractively and legibly
Build powerful Views query displays
Integrate with SQL databases
Customize Views with relationships, arguments, and filters
Optimize query performance
Add custom styles with the Panels module
Maintain full control over sites as you deploy into production
This book will help you create more powerful, flexible, usable, and manageable Web sites—whether you’re a Web developer, designer, administrator, architect, or consultant.
The accompanying Web site contains all examples, code, and themes presented in this book.
Earl Miles is a permanent member and founder of the Drupal Association. In 2005, Earl found Drupal and thought it was exactly what he needed to build a website in his spare time. When he found that Drupal lacked some key features, Earl ignored work for three weeks and created the Views module which has been instrumental in Drupal’s continued growth. Earl has been active in the community providing support, as well as posting tips and tricks when the mood strikes him. A lifelong programmer, he is currently employed by iO1, a company that actively participates in the development and consumption of open source software.
Lynette Miles has worked for fifteen years in professional software technical support, mainly for Alcatel-Lucent. She became involved with Drupal after attending DrupalCon Brussels and DrupalCon Barcelona. Since then, she has spent most of her contributing time working with the Drupal Documentation team and triaging the Views and Panels queues.
