Leveraging Drupal: Getting Your Site Done Right (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)

by Victor Kane (Author)
Key Phrases: workshop leader, content construction kit, update status, Workshop Member, Done Figure, Full Swing Agile Approach (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
This book is a step-by-step guide and a hands-on co-piloted experience for those trying to make Drupal powered websites work for them, and for their clients. Much more than a "tutorial", what is needed is a nuts-and-bolts living mentor and guide which really shows the reader how to do the things really required for bringing it all together in a site which works. This will be the only book covering all the difficult components of Drupal: views, panels, themes, content creation, etc. The book will cover:
* How to upgrade your hopelessly outdated and obsolete-software dependent site and bring it into the Drupal mainstream and future
* How to become a great Drupal themer and make "non-Drupal" looking sites
* How to really customize Drupal for your real needs
* How to start using best practices in Drupal web application development
* How to work like the pro Drupal shops and be ready for big projects - and small ones
* Learn by example (code samples, theme samples, videos) at every step

From the Back Cover

Leveraging Drupal®

As an open source, community-based content management system and web site application development framework, Drupal allows you to create interactive, media-based, database-driven web sites that become a part of everyday activities and communications. This unique book is the first of its kind to tackle the challenging task of leveraging Drupal to get a site done right and make that site work for you, based on industry-wide software development best practices.

Within these pages, you will gain insight into how to work with any release of Drupal, approach your project, establish a development environment, plan for deployment, and avoid pitfalls along the way. A real-world example of a web site application based on Drupal—an online Literary Workshop—is used throughout the book, and it walks you through the entire development lifecycle. You'll learn how to bring your web site into the exciting Drupal mainstream, customize Drupal for your specific needs, and even make "non-Drupal" looking sites. With this hands-on guide, you'll discover how to use Drupal to efficiently publish, manage, and organize a wide variety of content on your web site.

What you will learn from this book

• Best practices to optimize the way you approach development projects

• Methods for setting up a development environment using version control and issue tracking tools

• How the Drupal theming system works and how it separates content from presentation and style

• Techniques for upgrading and deploying the online Literary Workshop

• The future of Drupal and how it might be developed and used

Who this book is for

This book is for Drupal users of all levels of expertise who are looking to put together a sophisticated web application.

Wrox guides are crafted to make learning programming languages and technologies easier than you think. Written by programmers for programmers, they provide a structured, tutorial format that will guide you through all the techniques involved.

Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Wrox; Pap/Onl edition (February 3, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470410876
• ISBN-13: 978-0470410875
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #41,297 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Drupal from an enterprise viewpoint, February 14, 2009

By	Michael McKee "mystic cowboy" (Port Townsend, WA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This is not your typical how to book that starts from simple concepts and gradually builds into more complex areas. It starts by going into team roles and responsibilities, a subject that is seldom mentioned in any software book, and jumps right into the deep end of the pool with version control. There are screen dumps of terminal processes and code sprinkled throughout.

That is not to say that concepts are not adequately explained. They are, or that the small shop wouldn't benefit from this book. It can. It's just that the reader will find subject progression to be a bit different than typical. It works, especially within the context of the project the book covers, a writing workshop site.

As far as post-production responsibilities goes, that is one that is generally not addressed before website development and that lack shows in poorly maintained sites and inter-organizational bickering if not addressed early on in the process. I'm glad to see it mentioned here. That point highlights the audience for this book. It doesn't seem written for the lone developer or small team that builds third party sites but for an IT department that will deploy the project and maintain the site.

The project the book details, a membership based writing workshop, is well conceived as an example of the Drupal's extreme flexibility. The third party modules used, like CCK and Views are the foundation add-ons for custom Drupal sites. Other helpful modules, that I haven't used before are also covered and well. The book simultaneously covers version 5, 6 and 7 of Drupal, which could be useful within a company that has to maintain its own sites.

How to create custom administrative views for different site users is well covered. The resulting website is truly custom but in usable real-world ways. And I appreciate the short chapter on jQuery and the little preview of Drupal 7.

For someone who has at least some basic Drupal chops and wants to see how a real expert goes about developing a site, this is could be a good addition to the bookshelf.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A planned approach to successful web development, February 7, 2009

By	Dean Meyers - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In creating web sites, there will be those who will find their strength in the Theming/User Interface side, and those who are wizards at functionality, creating modules that add yet more capabilities. I would consider this book best for the project manager or small shop developer who has to oversee the entire process while interacting with clients, developers and designers, and wants a thorough approach to successful use of Drupal for any size application.

While relatively new to Drupal, I have designed and developed web sites since 1995. I believe the most common problems or bottlenecks come not nearly as much from the question of the software chosen or even the design, but resolving what the site is supposed to do, who is going to use it, and how it will be managed and maintained. This became a greater issue when non-technical administrators took over the mundane tasks of refreshing content, approving users, etc., through the use of user-friendly content management systems. Development expanded and widened in scope, and content management systems are now complex applications.

As Drupal has risen in popularity through its flexibility, scalability and stability as a CMS platform, a good number of books have come out to help developers jump on board, some with a focused approach on building functionality or designing themes, while others offer more general instruction on setting up and getting a site online. Victor Kane's book falls somewhere between both, but adds two components that often are not accounted for in this kind of "how to" book.

First, he explains how to create a framework for approaching software/web site development that begins with client-oriented goals. He specifically advocates the use of an Agile approach, dedicating the first chapter not to Drupal per se, but to putting a plan in order before unpacking the software or installing a single module. He consistently refers back to this approach as he guides the user through the development of a model site (an On-line Writing Workshop), returning to Agile development more deeply in Chapter 11.

Second, while many development teams attached to IT departments in larger companies or agencies are used to keeping track of revisions when a job is split up between many programmers, the "one-man team" can learn best practices through the software examples given in the book that explain the hows and whys of keeping a web-based tracking system for Drupal site development. More than just mentioning this as good advice, he puts it to practice throughout the book. I haven't seen this discussed in most books about open source CMS development, and I think it's worth noting. You will learn about Version Control nearly as much as you will learn about Drupal from this book!

Where there might be more than one way of doing something, such as installing Drupal onto a home system for testing or loading it onto a shared host, he will give as many as two or three different ways to do so. There is little he doesn't discuss thoroughly, and he invites the reader to join him in expanding and improving the lessons in the book through a web site he has set up to continue the learning/mentoring/sharing process that is a hallmark of the Drupal community's approach to "world domination".

As with other books on Drupal, you might want to have some books on PHP around, along with a little background in Unix/Linux shell commands, CSS and HTML for reference. He adds a chapter on jQuery and is probably the first in print with some content on Drupal 7, which is projected to arrive in late 2009.

It's a great addition to the growing number of books on Drupal, and stands out for his unique discussion of planning and versioning, which is applicable to any web project.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book will make you a more mature developer, February 17, 2009

By	Jason Kirst - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As a website developer specializing in Drupal-based sites for the last few years, I found this book to be exactly what I needed. I have several other books about drupal, including Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition (Beginning from Novice to Professional) and Learning Drupal 6 Module Development: A practical tutorial for creating your first Drupal 6 modules with PHP, yet I have found Leveraging Drupal to be the most helpful yet.

Leveraging Drupal goes into precisely the topics related to Drupal development which your average "working stiff" building Drupal sites runs into on every job: version control, the development and deployment process, upgrades, internationalization options, theming, etc. Included are helpful life-saving tidbits such as dealing with the infamous WSOD (php's white screen of death), checking out drupal via CVS, and setting up cron. It more than pays for itself in just the first three chapters.

One of the things I like most about the book is that the author treats website development with the same respect as any software project. From the book: "First of all, in a software project (and because of it's complexity, that is what a website application is), you are either controlled by circumstances or you succeed - but only if you can maintain your grip on things."

I would compare it to my other favorite programming book: Agile Java(TM): Crafting Code with Test-Driven Development (Robert C. Martin Series) by Jeff Langr. Leveraging Drupal is similar in that after reading and digesting it, you are a more mature developer than you were before.