In Detail
Drupal is a powerful CMS used to build all kinds of web sites. But when you're urgently tasked with building a specific kind of site, it's not always obvious which plugins to use or where to begin. If I could show you simple directions to create Drupal web sites for personal or business use within a day, without the initial need to bother about the in-depth details of using Drupal, would you be interested? Build first learn later!
This book will give you a competitive edge by helping you to rapidly implement prototype web projects for personal and business use. With this book almost anyone with just a bit of Drupal knowledge can build a web site and tailor it to his/he needs.
This book is a project-based guide to developing web applications with Drupal. It should enable you to take full advantage of the powerful core features offered by the Drupal framework together with the many available contributed modules and themes to develop applications within hours. You will be guided, by means of illustrated hands-on example projects, to build foundation projects that you may easily adapt or enhance to create even more powerful web projects. If you want to develop exciting web applications for profit or pleasure this book is for you.
This book is, however, not an introduction to Drupal, nor an in-depth manual for using Drupal; and even though it partially covers some basics such as installation and how to create nodes, this is only done in the process of building the featured projects. Readers should therefore already have an understanding of the basic Drupal terminologies, how to access and to use the administration pages, and also how to customize by uploading and engaging new themes
This project-oriented book uses illustrative screenshots to provide a starting foundation for 12 powerful Drupal web site projects for tailoring to your needs, including community, blog network, e-commerce store, photo sharing, Google mashup, and so on
Approach
The hands-on example projects in this book are based on fictitious web site development briefs, and they illustrate practical ways of applying Drupal. The book dives straight into the process of constructing the featured projects. A chapter is dedicated to each example web site project. Each chapter contains a fictitious brief from which we derive the list of core and contributed modules that we will require to implement the project. Then each chapter progresses into step-by-step instructions for building the web project, aided by the extensive use of screenshots.
When you have completed each project, you will have the knowledge and confidence to apply the techniques you have learned to create your own custom web application.
Who this book is for
This book is for anybody who wants to build a range of Drupal sites, and see how to apply the many available Drupal plugins and features in different scenarios. If you develop Drupal sites professionally, or would like to try building web sites as a freelancer, this is a great book to help you get started.
