Programmers

Advanced level is intended for PHP and MySQL developers who have also had a prior contact with Drupal. This level is designed for Website developers who work for for third parties or for those entrepreneurs with an advanced technical level who wish to launch their own business ideas.

Contents:

• 41. Drupal development best practices
• 42. Tools for developers
• 43. Drupal Architecture
• 44. Creating modules
• 45. Database access and database schemas
• 46. Menu system
• 47. Creating forms
• 48. Programming blocks
• 49. Programming users and permissions
• 50. Programming content types
• 51. Programming entities and fields
• 52. Programming actions and triggers
• 53. Working with Files
• 54. Search system
• 55. Translating modules
• 56. Creating themes
• 57. Using jQuery and Ajax
• 58. Features
• 59. Installation Profiles
• 60. Contributing to the Drupal Community

The Intermediate level complements the beginner level. It is aimed at people who already had previous contact with Drupal and want to understand it in depth and make better use of its full potential. Completing this level is very useful for building professional Websites with features that go far beyond company webs or personal blogs. Programming knowledge is not required to study intermediate level.

Contents:

• 21. Creating forms with Webform
• 22. Advanced content types
• 23. Views
• 24. Automatic image processing
• 25. Extending menus with additional modules
• 26. Extending blocks with additional modules
• 27. Panels
• 28. Display Suite
• 29. Customizing Themes
• 30. Actions and Triggers
• 31. Rules
• 32. Defining contexts
• 33. Extending users
• 34. Workflow
• 35. Multilingual sites
• 36. E-commerce: Introduction to Ubercart and Drupal Commerce
• 37. SEO Positioning with Drupal
• 38. Social tools: voting and sharing content
• 39. Newsletter Subscription
• 40. Other Features

Beginner level is aimed at those people with or without technical training, who want to start creating Websites. It is also very useful for companies or professionals who wish to create their professional or personal Website without depending on external assistance. At this level, the aim is for the student to acquire sound basic knowledge in order to tackle the following educational levels with guarantees.

Contents:

• 1. Introduction to Drupal
• 2. Drupal installation
• 3. Administration area
• 4. Content management
• 5. Content types
• 6. Menu management
• 7. Blocks management
• 8. Themes
• 9. Extending functionality with modules
• 10. Management of users, roles and permissions
• 11. Taxonomy
• 12. Text formats and WYSIWYG editors
• 13. Blogs
• 14. Forums
• 15. Structured documents: Books
• 16. Media Galleries
• 17. Searches
• 18. Languages and translation
• 19. Access statistics
• 20. Website management, maintenance and updating
• Annex A. Configuration of the hosting and necessary tools
• Annex B. Links and resources of interest

If you’re a web programmer, your experiences have taught you certain lessons—and only some of them apply well to Drupal. Drupal has its own set of programming principles that require a different approach, and many programmers make mistakes when relying on skills they’ve used for other projects. This book will show you which programming techniques you can use—and which you should avoid—when building web applications with this popular content management framework.

Updated to cover both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8, the guidelines in this book demonstrate which programming practices conform to the "Drupal way" and which don’t. The book also serves as an excellent guide for Drupal 7 programmers looking to make the transition to Drupal 8.

• Get an overview of Drupal, including Drupal core and add-on modules and themes
• Learn Drupal’s basic programming principles, such as the ability to customize behavior and output with hooks
• Compare Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 programming methods, APIs, and concepts
• Discover common Drupal programming mistakes—and why hacking is one of them
• Explore specific areas where you can put your programming skills to work
• Learn about the new object-oriented Drupal 8 API, including plugins and services

How can you help your Drupal website continue to perform at the highest level as it grows to meet demand? This comprehensive guide provides best practices, examples, and in-depth explanations for solving several performance and scalability issues. You’ll learn how to apply coding and infrastructure techniques to Drupal internals, application performance, databases, web servers, and performance analysis.

Covering Drupal versions 7 and 8, this book is the ideal reference for everything from site deployment to implementing specific technologies such as Varnish, memcache, or Solr. If you have a basic understanding of Drupal and the Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) stack, you’re ready to get started.

• Establish a performance baseline and define goals for improvement
• Optimize your website’s code and front-end performance
• Get best and worst practices for customizing Drupal core functionality
• Apply infrastructure design techniques to launch or expand a site
• Use tools to configure, monitor, and optimize MySQL performance
• Employ alternative storage and backend search options as your site grows
• Tune your web servers through httpd and PHP configuration
• Monitor services and perform load tests to catch problems before they become critical

From the publisher's description:

In Pro Drupal as an Enterprise Development Platform authors Jamie Kurtz and Thomas Besluau explain how developers can save themselves time and money, and build their applications faster with fewer bugs by using the Drupal CMS as a foundation for their projects. The days when custom client applications were built entirely from scratch are over. Today, it makes business sense to use a flexible, highly scalable framework such as Drupal, Joomla or DotNetNuke as a foundation. This book focuses on why Drupal makes a particularly strong choice for the majority of developers.

With an unprecedented level of community support, tens of thousands of well-proven plug-ins and modules available for download, and advanced content management rules and configuration engines Drupal is flexible enough to provide a firm base upon which almost all enterprise application developers can build their own custom solutions.

As this book will make clear, it is no longer necessary for developers to write complex applications entirely from scratch for each of their clients. Instead,they should begin by using an enterprise-class CMS like Drupal to provide a robust foundation for them so that they can concentrate their time and skills into solving the business-specific problems of each individual client maximizing the value that they add to each assignment.

Start reading Drupal as an Enterprise Development Platform today to get your development team out of the trenches and back on track to delivering real-world business value.

What you’ll learn

• Achieve a thorough understanding of how Drupal supports enterprise-grade application development. Find the answers to most common development, testing, deployment and maintance questions relating to large-scale deployment.
• Read a comprehensive walk-through of the common business continuity, regulatory and security concerns that come with using Drupal as a development platform and how to address them effectively.
• Walk-through real world examples of integrating Drupal into new or existing service-oriented architectures (SOA).
• Be inspired as to the many and varied application build types that Drupal is easily able to support.
• Get a head-start on your competition!

Who this book is for

This book is targeted at enterprise software developers, architects, and managers looking to increase productivity and reduce time to market on new services, applications, features, and bug fixes. Knowledge of PHP is not required.