Site administrators

With all the complex configuration options of Drupal, the Configuration Management system allows you to keep track of your configuration and move configuration changes between several development environments with ease. Its API allows you to add your own configuration settings within a custom module.

Drupal 8 Configuration Management will teach you everything you need to know about the Configuration Management system and get you started with using its features quickly, whether you are a Drupal site administrator with no programming knowledge or a seasoned developer. Starting at defining what Configuration Management actually means and why you should be using it, the book also covers how site administrators can make the most out of it without any programming knowledge. For more advanced users with programming skills, the book explains how to use the API to add custom configuration and how to upgrade custom modules to use the new Configuration Management. The book also covers some essential tools and best practices.

After reading the book, you will be able to write schema files for custom configurations, make use of the Configuration Management API, and upgrade modules to the new Configuration Management systems. Additionally, you will learn how to migrate configuration from Drupal 6 and 7 to Drupal 8 and how to manage configuration for multilingual websites.

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

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

What you will learn from this book

• Gain an understanding of how the search engines function.
• Develop an SEO strategy for your site.
• Select the most effective key phrases.
• Configure your Drupal site to be search engine friendly.
• The top extensions to enhance your Drupal sites search engine optimization.
• Execute a link building campaign.
• Develop content that advances your search marketing goals.
• What the most important factors to track with Google Analytics are.

In Detail

Drupal is a free and open-source content management system and content management framework written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It is used as a back-end system for at least 1.5% of all websites worldwide ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and government sites. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process and techniques by which you optmize the content and style of your site in order to induce more people to view it.

Drupal SEO will help you develop and execute an effective search engine optimization strategy for your site. From planning to implementation, the book covers best practices in contemporary SEO.

In Drupal SEO you will learn how to develop a dynamic and productive SEO campaign. Covering both the basics of campaign development as well as the daily work it takes to maintain your SEO competitiveness, this book will show you how to produce a distinct and appropriate strategy for your site. In particular you will learn key phrase selection and competitor analysis and the correct groundwork for your dynamic SEO campaign.

Drupal SEO will then show you, by finding the right combination of extensions, how to supercharge your site. You will also be given a guided tour of key SEO services, like Google and Bing Webmaster, in order to implement a progressive and effective link building campaign. You will then learn key expert tips and tricks to enable you to build SEO-effective content which will take your site from invisible to unmissable with little effort.

Approach

The book will take a hands-on approach to the process involved in configuring a site for SEO. As SEO is an on-going process – it doesn’t stop once the site is built – the book will provide reusable tips and techniques in order to understand what they have to do after the site is live.

Who this book is for

This book targets site builders, webmasters and site owners. Advanced technical skills are not required, though the user should be familiar with administering a Drupal website.

What you will learn from this book

• Create and work with content nodes
• Organize your site with Blocks and Menu Blocks
• Work with Views and Custom Content Types (CCK)
• Building pages using Panels
• Personalize your site with a document library, an image slideshow, or a custom Drupal 7 theme
• Learn how to provide your site visitors with multilingual content
• Manage user accounts, roles, and permissions
• Maintain, optimize and back up your Drupal site

In Detail

Drupal 7 is a modern Content Management System famed for its flexibility and power. Using Drupal you can easily create custom functionality that would otherwise have to be purchased in many of the other leading CMSs.

"Drupal 7 Cookbook" is filled with recipes to help you to do more with Drupal and improve your skills. Chapters range from content creation, to theming, to managing your site. You will learn how to create your own content types and use them to create Views, Blocks, and Pages. This book will take you from novice to pro in just 12 chapters.

In a wide variety of practical recipes, you will learn how to work with views and panels, how to provide translations for your content to create a multilingual site, and to integrate your site with social media. You can develop the Zen starter theme or learn how to create custom cross-browser compatible Drupal themes, including themes for mobile devices. The Drupal 7 Cookbook contains all of the means necessary to take your skills from those of a novice Drupal user to a proficient site builder.

Approach

As part of Packt’s cookbook series, this book is packed with practical recipes that you can read as and when you need or want to.

Who this book is for

This book is for people who are familiar with the concepts of web development and CMS. If you have previous experience of working with Drupal, then this book will further your knowledge and give you ideas for fun new things to do with Drupal.