Site administrators

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.

Details from Packtpub.com:

Overview

• Prepare your server for hosting multiple sites
• Configure and install several sites on one instance of Drupal
• Manage and share themes and modules across the multi-site configuration

Use the hashtag #PacktDrupalMS on Twitter to discuss the book with the author, fellow readers, and Packt.

What you will learn from this book

• Configure MySQL and Apache for hosting multiple sites
• Prepare Drupal 7 to host more than one site
• Install several sites on one instance of Drupal
• Manage, share, or isolate modules and themes in a multi-site configuration
• Care for your multi-site server, safely managing and upgrading it
• Rapidly build a multi-site testing environment with VirtualBox and Vagrant
• Extend the core multi-site configuration with add-on modules

In Detail

Drupal is one of the most powerful PHP Content Management Systems there is. However, why would you install a CMS for every site you build? With just one copy of Drupal you can host several sites. Drupal has long had multi-site support, and Drupal 7’s support is even better than previous versions.

Drupal 7 Multi-Sites Configuration will teach you how to host several websites on a single copy of Drupal. You will learn how to create different sites, each with its own domain, content, and theme. This valuable information will help you to save time by managing modules and sharing them across several sites as well as administering your sites all in one place.

This book will show you how to configure a system for multi-site, and then install several sites on one copy of Drupal, all with their own domain name and database. Learn how to install and share modules and themes, configure Apache, PHP, and MySQL for multi-site, and then manage the site. Once your site system is successfully set up, discover some of the advanced configurations possible with Drupal multi-site, as well as how to upgrade and maintain your sites.

Approach

Follow the creation of a multi-site instance with Drupal. The practical examples and accompanying screenshots will help you to get multiple Drupal sites set up in no time.

Who this book is for

This book is for Drupal site builders. It is assumed that readers are familiar with Drupal already, with a basic grasp of its concepts and components. System administration concepts, such as configuring Apache, MySQL, and Vagrant are covered but no previous knowledge of these tools is required.