Designers/themers

See the original announcement about Front End Drupal’s release in the Drupal news section.

Publisher’s description:

“For Drupal to succeed, we need books like this.” –Dries Buytaert, Drupal founder and project lead

“Drupal faces a common problem on the Web–the relative lack of new, high quality themes. Front End Drupal tackles this problem directly and is designed to help both experienced designers and rank novices get an understanding of how Drupal theming works. In fact, I’ll be the first to admit I learned a lot from this book.”
– Dries Buytaert, Drupal founder and project lead

The Practical, Complete Guide to Customizing Drupal Sites with Behaviors, Themes, and Templates

Drupal is now the world’s #1 open source content management system: Thousands of individuals and organizations are using it to build and update Web sites of virtually every kind. As Web designers and developers adopt Drupal, they need ways to quickly customize the visuals and interactivity of their sites. Drupal offers powerful tools for doing so, but little guidance on using them effectively. Front End Drupal is the solution. In this book, two expert Drupal developers cover everything you need to know to create great visual designs and state-of-the-art interactivity with Drupal’s behaviors, themes, and templates.

Front End Drupal is 100% focused on issues of site design, behavior, usability, and management. The authors show how to style Drupal sites, make the most of Drupal’s powerful templating system, build sophisticated community sites, streamline site management, and build more portable, flexible themes. You’ll also gain hands-on experience through several case studies that walk you through the customization of everything from page templates to Web site forums.

• Prepare and organize content so it’s easier to integrate into Drupal Web sites
• Structure Drupal page templates that are easy to work with
• Configure Drupal with the modules and browser tools you need to customize your site
• Utilize Drupal’s Starter Themes and themes converted from WordPress, Joomla!™, and Drupal 5.x
• Maximize the power and usability of Drupal’s content editing forms
• Build usable community sites with user profiles, comments, and user-generated content
• Use JavaScript™ to make your themes interactive and to enhance usability
• Create powerful animations and AJAX callbacks with jQuery, Drupal’s JavaScript library

About the Web Site

The accompanying site, frontenddrupal.com, contains all sample code and themes presented in this book.

Publisher’s description:

Written in cookbook style, this book offers solutions to all common theme design problems through recipes. Each recipe contains step-by-step instructions followed by the analysis of what was done in each task and other useful information. The book is designed so that you can read it chapter by chapter, or you can look at the list of recipes and refer to them in no particular order. This book is written for Drupal developers who want to refresh the look and feel of their sites. If you are a Drupal site administrator who is looking to go beyond the basics and customize the presentational aspects of your Drupal site, then this book is for you. It assumes that readers are familiar with rudimentary PHP and acquainted with Drupal installation and general usage. Readers are also expected to have knowledge of CSS and XHTML.

Publisher’s description:

Pro Drupal 7 Development updates the most popular development reference for the release of Drupal 7. With several new and completely-rewritten essential APIs and improvements in Drupal 7, this book will not only teach developers how to write modules ranging from simple to complex, but also how Drupal itself works.

• Learn the Drupal APIs and major changes in Drupal 7
• Learn how to write Drupal modules using the APIs
• Learn proper development practices and how to become a contributing community member

What you’ll learn

• How to get started with writing basic modules
• The flexible Drupal APIs and how they interact with modules
• How new features in Drupal 7 make modules even more powerful and sophisticated
• Best practices when developing in Drupal (coding standards, help developer modules)
• How to write safe, secure, and tested code
• How to contribute modules back to the Drupal community and maintain their modules using the Concurrent Versions System (CVS)

Who this book is for

This book is for existing Drupal module developers wanting to learn about Drupal 7 and people already knowledgeable in PHP who are interested in developing for Drupal. Simply put, if you are working with Drupal, then you need this book.

Table of Contents

• How Drupal Works
• Writing a Module
• Hooks, Actions, and Triggers
• The Menu System
• Working with Databases
• Working with Users
• Working with Nodes
• Working with Fields
• The Theme System
• Working with Blocks
• The Form API
• Manipulating User Input: The Filter System
• Searching and Indexing Content
• Working with Files
• Working with Taxonomy
• Caching
• Sessions
• Using jQuery
• Localization and Translation
• XML-RPC
• Writing Secure Code
• Development Best Practices
• Optimizing Drupal
• Installation Profiles
• Testing
• Database Table Reference
• Resources

Publisher’s description:

How to develop powerful mobile Web sites using popular content management systems (CMS)

Mobile is the hottest thing going—and developing content for mobile devices and browsers is even hotter than that. This book is your guide to it all—how to design, build, and deploy sites, blogs and services that will work brilliantly for mobile users. You’ll learn about the state-of-the-art of mobile web development, the tools available to use, and the best practices for creating compelling mobile user interfaces. Then, using the most popular content management systems, WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal, you’ll learn how to building world-class mobile web sites from existing platforms and content.. The book walks you through each platform, including how to use third-party plug-ins and themes, explains the strategies for writing your own logic, how to switch between mobile and desktop, and much more.

• Provides a technical review of the mobile landscape and acquaints you with a range of mobile devices and networks
• Covers topics common to all platforms, including site topologies, switching between mobile and desktop, common user interface patterns, and more
• Walks you through each content management platform—WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal—first focusing on standard plug-ins and themes and then exploring advanced techniques for writing your own themes or logic
• Explains the best practices for testing, deploying, and integrating a mobile web site
• Also explores analytics, m-commerce, and SEO techniques for mobile

Get ahead of the the mobile web development curve with this professional and in-depth reference guide!

From the Back Cover

Learn to implement sites with the major content management platforms

The popularity of the mobile web is seemingly unstoppable, making the demand and expectations for sleek, smooth, and sophisticated web sites extraordinarily high. Unique to the shelf, this book describes how you can develop mobile content and then install, configure, test, and integrate mobile web sites using the most popular content management systems (CMS) in order to provide an engaging and enjoyable experience to users on the move. Placing a special emphasis on three particular platforms—WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal—author James Pearce explains how to design and mobilize sites in conjunction with each CMS and walks you through the installation and configuration of the plugins, modules, and themes that will get you started, fast.

Professional Mobile Web Development:

• Features a brief history of the mobile web and explains what makes it unique
• Provides a technical review of the mobile landscape and familiarizes you with mobile devices, networks, and their challenges
• Looks at how the mobile web is evolving and how best to design for it
• Reviews choices and decisions that should be made prior to working on CMS mobilization
• Describes the processes involved in testing, deploying, and integrating a mobile web site, regardless of platform
• Discusses mobile analytics, advertising, and other operational topics

See the original announcement about Drupal 7 Themes’s release in the Drupal news section.

Publisher’s description:

Create new themes for your Drupal 7 site with a clean layout and powerful CSS styling

• Learn to create new Drupal 7 themes
• No experience of Drupal theming required
• Discover techniques and tools for creating and modifying themes
• The first book to guide you through the new elements and themes available in Drupal 7

In Detail

Drupal is an award winning open source Content Management System (CMS). Based on PHP and MySQL, its power and flexibility combined with its exceptional design mean it is one of the most popular choices for creating a CMS website..

Drupal employs a specialized templating system and supports themes, which allow you to change the look and feel of your system's front and back-end interfaces.

Drupal 7 Themes is an ideal introduction to theming with Drupal 7. If you want to create a striking new look for your Drupal 7 website, this book is for you. This book is a revised, updated and expanded edition of Drupal 6 Themes, rewritten specifically for Drupal 7.

This book will show you techniques and tools to help you improve the look and feel of any Drupal 7-powered website. Starting from the basics of theme setup and configuration, you will learn about the Drupal theming architecture and the PHPTemplate engine, and then move on to modifying existing themes and building new themes from scratch. You will find out about tools to make your theme development easier.

A practical guide showing you how to create themes for your Drupal 7 site

What you will learn from this book

• Learn about the Drupal 7 Theming Architecture
• Find and install new themes
• Get the most from Drupal's theme configuration system
• Create a new theme from scratch
• Master PHPTemplate
• Modify the default templates and styles
• Override the default templates with your own
• Create dynamic styling that responds to the content or the user
• Discover tools that make theming easier and more efficient

Approach

Filled with practical examples, this book helps you to understand the logic behind the theming system employed in Drupal, and how to make it work for you. You will learn key concepts and work through examples with careful, step-by-step instructions.

Who this book is written for

The main requirements to make use of this book are knowledge of HTML, CSS, and a touch of creativity. You don't need to know anything about theming in Drupal; all you need is basic experience of working with Drupal.

Although this book aims to make Drupal theming accessible to designers, theming in Drupal 7 involves writing some PHP code, and a basic knowledge of PHP will be helpful.

Regardless of your technical skills, this book will teach you to design themes for your Drupal websites quickly and easily.

Publisher’s description:

The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 is the most comprehensive book for building web sites using the powerful and extensible Drupal content management framework.

Written by active community members and contributors (“some of the brightest and most innovative minds in the Drupal community,” to quote Angela Byron, Drupal 7 maintainer), The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 covers the basics then quickly advances to in-depth exploration of the functionality and tools that make Drupal so powerful for building web applications. Just as important, this book provides the reader with a guide to participating in the Drupal community: an international, committed, rapidly growing community of themers, developers, and open source advocates who write the modules, test the code, and work ceaselessly to make Drupal great. The release of Drupal 7, with its dramatic improvements in usability and system architecture, will take Drupal to a new level of popularity, and this book will help give you the foundation and scaffolding to grow with Drupal.

With The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7, you will be able to:

• Plan and build a complete Drupal site with core alone.
• Extend Drupal's functionality by selecting from thousands of modules.
• Make your Drupal site look like anything you want with theming and jQuery.
• Extend Drupal by coding your own modules.
• Install Drupal in many environments.
• Use essential tools such as Drush and Git to make your life easier.
• Contribute to the Drupal community as an organizer or a coder.

Who this book is for

Anyone who is serious about getting better at Drupal.

Table of Contents

• Building a Drupal 7 Site
• Essential Tools: Drush and Git
• Building Dynamic Pages Using Views
• There's a Module for That
• Creating Community Web Sites with Organic Groups
• Security in Drupal
• Updating Drupal
• Extending Your Site
• Drupal Community: Getting Help and Getting Involved
• Planning and Managing a Drupal Project
• Documenting for End Users and the Production Team
• Development Environment
• Putting a Site Online and Deploying New Features
• Developing from a Human Mindset
• Theming
• Advanced Theming
• jQuery
• Introduction to Module Development
• Using Drupal's APIs in a Module
• Refining Your Module
• Porting Modules to Drupal 7
• Writing Project-Specific Code
• Introduction to Functional Testing with Simpletest
• Writing a Major Module
• Drupal Commerce
• Drush
• Scaling Drupal
• Spice Your Content Up with Tasty Semantics
• The Menu System and the Path Into Drupal
• Under the Hood: Inside Drupal When It Displays a Page
• Search and Apache Solr Integration
• User Experience
• Completing a Site: The Other 90%
• Drupal Distributions and Installation Profiles
• Drupal's Story: A Chain of Many Unexpected Events
• Now You're in Business: Making a Living with Drupal
• Maintaining a Project
• Contributing to the Community
• Appendix A: Updating a Drupal Site from 6 to 7
• Appendix B: Profiling Drupal and Optimizing Performance
• Appendix C: Page Rendering and Altering
• Appendix D: Visual Design in Drupal
• Appendix E: Accessibility
• Appendix F: Windows Development Environment
• Appendix G: Installing Drupal on Ubuntu
• Appendix H: Mac OS X Installation
• Appendix I: Setting Up a Drupal Environment with the Acquia Dev Desktop