Beginning Drupal 7 (Expert's Voice in Open Source) [Paperback]

Todd Tomlinson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 7, 2010 | ISBN-10: 1430228598 | ISBN-13: 978-1430228592 | Edition: 1

This book focuses on the nontechnical user who is responsible for building, maintaining, and managing Drupal web sites. The book covers why you should consider using Drupal when building a new web site, what Drupal is, installing and configuring Drupal, creating and managing content, managing users, adding functionality to your web site through Drupal modules, and more advanced topics on using themes, panels, and views. By reading this book, you will:

• Understand why you should use Drupal and the power of the platform.
• Quickly build confidence in your ability to use Drupal.
• Gain the knowledge necessary to build, deploy, and manage web sites of moderate complexity on Drupal 7.

What you’ll learn

• What Drupal is and why you should use it
• How to install a basic Drupal web site from scratch
• How to create content in your new Drupal web site
• How to manage users on your new Drupal web site
• How to change the look and feel of your new Drupal web site through themes
• How to install and configure modules

Who this book is for

This book is for nontechnical users who need to use Drupal to manage content, as well as PHP developers who are new to Drupal.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to Drupal
2. Creating and Managing Content 
3. Creating and Managing Users 
4. Taxonomy  
5. Creating Menus
6. Installing Themes 
7. Drupal Blocks 
8. Drupal Modules 
9. Enabling Interactive Capabilities  
10. Content Types  
11. Views  
12. Panels  
13. Theming 
14. Administering Your Drupal Site  
15. Putting It All Together 
16. Case Study  

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

A bio is not available for this author.

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (June 7, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430228598
• ISBN-13: 978-1430228592
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #155,879 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Todd Tomlinson is a seasoned IT executive with 34 years of experience crossing multiple continents and technologies. He is a former Senior Director of EBusiness Strategy for Oracle Corporation, Senior Manager with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), Practice Director for IBM, Vice President for Claremont Technology Group, co-Founder-Vice President-and CTO of Emerald Solutions, Senior Managing Partner for CNF Ventures. Todd is currently the Vice President of Government Services for ServerLogic Corporation. Todd's passion for the web began in 1987 when he worked for the National Science Foundation at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center) - and expanded when he helped Netscape Communication deploy their server platforms around the world in 1995-1996. He started using Drupal as a mechanism to teach advanced web design and development for a local university, where he was the area chair and lead faculty member in the School of Business and Information Technology. He has helped many of the worlds largest organizations refocus their business around the web.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly Recommended!, February 28, 2011

By 

cjl - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Beginning Drupal 7 (Expert's Voice in Open Source) (Paperback)

I was very happy with this book and highly recommend it to anyone needing to get started with Drupal. Even if you have little or no experience with developing websites or other CMS packages, this book will give you a great start. It was a very quick read with lots of visuals and illustrations, and included ample information to get you on the fast track to developing websites using Drupal. The book covers everything a novice needs to know to get started, and presents it in a very organized fashion. It was a real "page turner" for me.

I've been developing desktop database applications for 15+ years (as a full-time IT Manager, and as a night/weekend consultant), but have been doing more work with websites in recent years. I have developed a few simple websites, and my first CMS experience was with Joomla. But after trying WordPress, I quickly converted the site I had in Joomla over to WordPress, and all web development since has been with WordPress.

The manufacturing company I work for full-time is in the process of developing a new corporate website. After looking at many expensive enterprise-level CMS packages (SiteCore, Kentico, etc..) we decided to go open source, primarily because of the lower hosting costs and we wanted to own 100% of the source code to our new website. After many hours of researching options, we decided to use Drupal as our base. Since my CMS experience has been primarily with WordPress, I needed a book to learn the basics of Drupal, and to help reinforce our decision to use Drupal before we started the development of the website.

This book will help me as I manage the developer(s) who will be developing our new website, and I look forward to reading "Foundation Drupal 7" and "Pro Drupal" next!

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Useful for New Users, June 9, 2010

By 

K. Fosson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Beginning Drupal 7 (Expert's Voice in Open Source) (Paperback)

As a new Drupal user I found Beginning Drupal 7 to be very useful for learning the basics.

Some of the features I found most helpful:

-Detailed instructions for installing Drupal

-Well organized chapters about the basic elements of a Drupal site

(e.g. menus, users, blocks, themes, etc..)

-Author suggestions for modules

-A detailed case study to explain the process

-An appendix about integrating social networking

The book didn't go into too much detail about custom themes or e-commerce, but there were chapters for each. Overall a great starting point for newbies!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Clear and concise, December 23, 2010

By 

Avo - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Beginning Drupal 7 (Expert's Voice in Open Source) (Kindle Edition)

This was a great help. Information at the Internet is not so ordered and clearly explained as this book.

Even if Drupal 7 is still in a release candidate version this book helps with the new concepts and way of working Drupal 7 brings.

However, I would wish for more detail with: The views module, Webforms module and maybe a little of multimedia support (image and video galleries, image uploads for users).

Kindle edition looks great!