Learning Drupal 6 Module Development: A practical tutorial for creating your first Drupal 6 modules with PHP (Paperback)

by Matt Butcher (Author)
Key Phrases: biography nodes, site news message, descartes theme, Philosopher Bios, Remove All, Home Create (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
In Detail

With great power comes... tremendous flexibility. Drupal is an award-winning open-source Content Management System, and the feature-packed sixth release is right around the corner. It's a modular system, with an elegant hook-based architecture, and great code. These are a few of the perks that make Drupal a choice platform for developers who want the power of an established CMS, but the freedom to make it work for them. From social networking to AJAX to e-commerce, the hundreds of existing modules attest to Drupal's flexibility. When you create a new module for Drupal, it fits seamlessly into the look and feel of your overall site. If you can think it in PHP, you can code it as a Drupal module.

Dive into Drupal module development as we create the Philosopher Biographies website, developing new modules and themes to meet practical goals. Create custom content types. Add AJAX functionality with the jQuery library. Use external XML APIs to add content to your site. Email newsletters to site members. Use themes. Empower administrators with extra features. And bundle it all up in a custom installation profile. You won't find a "hello world" here!

If you're eager to start creating modules for Drupal 6, this is your book. Walk through the development of complete Drupal modules with this primer for PHP programmers. Specifically written for Drupal 6, this book will get you coding modules as quickly as possible, and help you add the features that will give your work that professional gloss!

Just getting started with Drupal development? This book will give you a clear, concise and, of course, practical guidance to take you from the basics of creating your first module to developing the skills to make you a Drupal developer to be reckoned with.

Are you a Drupal developer looking to update to version 6? This book covers the new and updated APIs to guide your transition to Drupal 6. The new menu system, the Forms and Schema APIs, and many core revisions are covered in this book.

What you will learn from this book?

• A developer's overview of important Drupal concepts and APIs, like nodes, menus, and forms
• Using Drupal tools for module development
• Creating a new module from scratch
• Harnessing the power of the Drupal hook system
• Using key Drupal functions
• Creating custom content types, from basic to advanced
• Performing database operations
• Writing module installers and uninstallers
• Making Drupal content available to JavaScript with a JSON service
• Interacting with the theme system to build crisp layouts
• Creating richer user interfaces with Drupal's JavaScript libraries
• Working with blocks, nodes, actions, and menus
• Using a web service to retrieve and display XML data
• Creating an administration interface
• Customizing user profiles
• Writing actions and triggering them with events
• Working with the Forms API
• Defining custom hooks and making modules work together
• Exploring the database and schema API
• Creating an installation profile to bundle your modules into a custom Drupal distribution

Who this book is written for?

This book is written for PHP developers who want to add custom features to Drupal. You will need to know the basics of PHP and MySQL programming, but no experience of programming Drupal is required, although you will be expected to be familiar with the basic operation of Drupal.

About the Author
Matt Butcher

Matt Butcher is a senior programmer at Palantir.net, where he specializes in content management systems, web services, and browser scripting. He has been an active participant in Open Source technologies for over a decade. Matt has written five books for Packt, including Learning Drupal 6 Module Development, Mastering OpenLDAP, and Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery., all of which are published by Packt. Matt writes his technical blog at technosophos.com. When not pushing bits, Matt likes to explore Chicago with his wife and three daughters.

Product Details

• Paperback: 328 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (May 8, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1847194443
• ISBN-13: 978-1847194442
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #52,675 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #31 in

  Books > Computers & Internet > Web Development > Programming > PHP

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good solid Drupal book, , August 29, 2008

By	Jeffrey Heaton "Jeff Heaton" (St. Louis, MO) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

It seems every version of Drupal likes to change the API considerably. Signatures change, and many functions are dropped. Backwards compatibility is really NOT a concern with Drupal. This book covers the current version, 6, of Drupal.

It walks you through all of the code ideas of Drupal module and theme development. And really does a great job of doing this. Even if you are familiar with 5, the book examples are such that you can skim and upgrade your knowledge to 6.x.

One nice addition would have been a bit of reference. Maybe list all of the hook functions. List all of the form component types, with every attribute. I often found myself going online for examples of how to do form components that were not covered by this book.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A solid guide to drupal, and a good introduction for experienced PHP developers, September 4, 2008

By	James Stewart (Grand Rapids, MI, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Last autumn's release of Pro Drupal Development was a significant moment in the history of the popular CMS, providing for the first time a relatively comprehensive guide for those wanting to do more than simply manage and skin a drupal site. A number of books have followed it but few have delved as deeply or been such a definitive guide.

Like most of the more recent books, Learning Drupal 6 Module Development focusses on a quite specific area of drupal development, but its a key one for any serious developer and touches every other area of the system. Experienced PHP developers may find that this book (in conjunction with some time for experimentation) will serve as a solid introduction to how they might build applications on top of drupal.

The book focusses on a single project--a website providing biographies of philosophers--and builds the modules it needs, introducing the various available tools and techniques along the way. Much of the time is devoted to generating custom content types, but there's very solid coverage of the hooks, filters, and actions that let modules really take integrate with the rest of the framework. Theming your output, using AJAX, and working with web services all get some time and illustrate how your app can be part of the wider web and keep up with its prevailing trends. A number of times I found myself reaching for code I'd written over the past few months to make amendments based on examples in the book.

I've been quite critical of books from packt lately and some of my criticisms apply here--he book itself feels flimsy and the print quality is poor--but this is also evidence that if an author and editor put the work in they do occasionally produce quality material despite the publisher. There are a number of asides that clarify language which demonstrate an attention to detail too often missing. It would have been good to see clearer signposts as to which features are new in Drupal 6 and which were available previously, but the online API docs can provide most of that.

When I reviewed Pro Drupal Development I noted some disappointment that the book didn't devote any time to automated testing of drupal code, and that criticism applies here too. Along with staged deployments, automated testing remains one of the least considered aspects of drupal and that's a serious concern for those looking to build robust well-managed applications on top of it. There are a few good articles online about how to test drupal code, but it would be good to see it taken more seriously as a core part of the module development process.

This book is likely to sit alongside Pro Drupal Development on my desk whenever I'm working on a drupal project and is a worthwhile investment for anyone who spends much time building drupal modules. There are clear areas for improved coverage, but it is as comprehensive an account as you'll find of how to build modules that take full advantage of the facilities Drupal provides.

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good book but glaring ommission with core code example, February 15, 2009

By	Kevin Roberts (Norcross, GA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

First off, I have to say that Matt Butcher is an excellent writer. I really like the way he takes a concept, let's you know where he is going, and then follows up with a lucid explanation. He does a great job of explaining his code.

However, on reading the other glowing reviews listed here on Amazon I seriously wonder how many actually tried to work through the example code contained in the book.

Chapter two gives the foundational example of building a module that accesses an RSS feed [...]. The code in the book does not work. So, diligent little beaver that I am, I went to the publisher's web site and checked the errata file. Sure enough, there were corrections to the code. After updating the code, it still didn't work. Finally, I downloaded the code examples from the publisher and found that the working code is *significantly* different than the example in the book! The changes found in the downloaded code not only differ from the book, but also from the corrections in the errata.

So, why do I still give this four stars? Well, it is still a very good book. Matt's skill as a technical writer is noticeably above the majority of technical authors I come across, and you will learn a great deal through reading this book. Just be sure you download the code archive from the publisher, and take the code in the book with a grain of salt until you compare it.