Advanced

What you will learn from this book

• Manipulate and utilize comment, file, field collection, node, term, user, and vocabulary entities
• Attach, manipulate, and utilize date, file, image, link, number, text, and term reference fields
• Write type-agnostic code dealing with more types of Drupal data than ever before
• Upgrade a legacy Drupal node module to expose and utilize entities
• Expose your legacy database tables as fully-fledged Drupal entities
• Batch import remote data and expose them as entities
• Glean good coding practices for dealing with entities

In Detail

Writing code for manipulating Drupal data has never been easier! Learn to dice and serve your data as you slowly peel back the layers of the Drupal entity onion. Next, expose your legacy local and remote data to take full advantage of Drupal's vast solution space.

Programming Drupal 7 Entities is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with a thorough knowledge of Drupal's entity paradigm and a number of clear step-by-step exercises, which will help you take advantage of the real power that is available when developing using entities.

This book looks at the Drupal 7 entity paradigm, and breaks down the mystery and confusion that developers face when building custom solutions using entities. It will take you through a number of clear, practical recipes that will help you to take full advantage of Drupal entities in your web solutions without much coding.

You will also learn how to expose local and remote data to give your legacy data new life as fully-fledged Drupal entities that can be used by other modules such as views, rules, and so on. In addition to this, you'll learn to create, retrieve, update, and delete (CRUD) entities, their properties and fields, along with some programmatic wizardry to manipulate complex entities such as field collections. If you want to develop quickly and easily using Drupal entities, then this is the book for you.

You will learn everything you need to know to develop code and expose data using entities in Programming Drupal 7 Entities.

Approach

The book follows a standard tutorial-based approach to create, retrieve, update, and delete Drupal 7 entities, their properties and fields.

Who this book is for

Programming Drupal 7 Entities is perfect for intermediate or advanced developers new to Drupal entity development who are looking to get a good grounding in how to code using the new paradigm. It’s assumed that you will have some experience in PHP development already, and being vaguely familiar with Drupal, GIT, and Drush will also help.

See the original announcement about Pro Drupal Development’s release in the Drupal news section.

Publisher’s description:

Drupal is one of the most popular content management systems in use today. With it, you can create a variety of community-driven sites, including blogs, forums, wiki-style sites, and much more. Pro Drupal Development was written to arm you with knowledge to customize your Drupal installation however you see fit. The book assumes that you already possess the knowledge to install and bring a standard installation online. Then authors John VanDyk and Matt Westgate delve into Drupal internals, showing you how to truly take advantage of its powerful architecture.

You’ll learn how to create your own modules, develop your own themes, and produce your own filters. You'll learn the inner workings of each key part of Drupal, including user management, sessions, the node system, caching, and the various APIs available to you. Of course, your Drupal-powered site isnt effective until you can efficiently serve pages to your visitors. As such, the authors have included the information you need to optimize your Drupal installation to perform well under high-load situations. Also featured is information on Drupal security and best practices, as well as integration of Ajax and the internationalization of your Drupal web site. Simply put, if you are working with Drupal at all, then you need this book.

• This book is written by Drupal core developers.
• Drupal architecture and behavior are mapped out visually.
• Common pitfalls are identified and addressed.
• Chapters provide regular discussion and reference to why things work they way they do, not just how.
• Features a foreword by Dries Buytaert, Drupal founder.

See the original announcement about Drupal 5 Views Recipes’s release in the Drupal news section.

Publisher’s description:

This book will give you a long list of powerful recipes. Choose the ones that suit your needs and use them through step-by-step instructions. Most of the recipes are code-free, but a number of the recipes contain code snippets. This book is primarily written for Drupal site builders, administrators, and themers who want to develop custom content displays using Views. It can be used by anyone who has a Drupal 5 web site, including original site developers as well as people who have inherited a Drupal 5 site. Some knowledge of HTML and CSS is required; PHP basics will be handy for some of the recipes.

About the Author

Marjorie Roswell is a web developer from Baltimore, MD. She has been building web sites that serve the community for more than a decade. Marjorie developed a GIS system for assisting citizen callers to the Baltimore Office of Recycling, and has taught professional classes in desktop publishing, AutoCAD, and Drupal. While in college, Marjorie received the Betty Flanders Thomson Prize for Excellence in Botany. She now brings together her love of plants and Drupal to create BaltimoreUrbanAg.org, the web site for the Baltimore Urban Agriculture Task Force. Marjorie enjoys writing and playing music with a community of local musicians. You can hear some of her music at FriendlyCoffeehouse.org.

See the original announcement about Pro Drupal Development (2nd Edition)’s release in the Drupal news section.

Publisher’s description:

Widely praised for its in–depth coverage of Drupal internals, bestselling Pro Drupal Development has been updated for Drupal 6 in this edition, and provides are even more tricks of the trade to help you further yourself as a professional Drupal developer.

Assuming you already know how to install and bring a standard installation online, John K. VanDyk gives you everything else you need to customize your Drupal installation however you see fit. Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition delves deep into Drupal internals, showing you how to take full advantage of its powerful architecture.

What you’ll learn

• Find out how to create your own modules, develop your own themes, and produce your own filters.
• Learn the inner workings of each key part of Drupal, including user management, sessions, the node system, caching, and the various APIs available to you.
• Discover how to optimize your Drupal installation to perform well under high–load situations.
• Gain the knowledge needed to secure your Drupal installation and other best practice techniques.
• Learn to integrate Ajax into and internationalize your Drupal web site.

Who this book is for

Web developers maintaining and creating sites with Drupal. It is assumed that you already know the basics of Drupal and are able to install and bring up a basic installation. This book takes you deeper into the internals of Drupal and teaches how to tweak and modify it in order to create that perfect web site. Simply put, if you are working with Drupal, you need Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition.

About the Author

John K. VanDyk has been a Drupal developer since 2004. In 2005, he organized the first Drupal conference in Antwerp, Belgium, with Drupal founder Dries Buytaert. John has contributed several modules to Drupal—including the actions, workflow, publish, subscribe, and pubcookie modules—and has been instrumental in the design of Drupal's Content Construction Kit. John's day job is as an entomology professor and systems analyst at Iowa State University, where he teaches undergraduate courses about insects. In his spare time, when not hacking on Drupal, John enjoys squash hunting and raising children.

See the original announcement about Drupal 6 - Javascript and jQuery’s release in the Drupal news section.

Publisher’s description:

This book fills the gap between Drupal 6 modules and theming by showing you how to make use of JavaScript and jQuery to join up server-side modules with your front-end designs. This book is for web designers and developers who want to add JavaScript elements to Drupal themes or modules to create more flexible and responsive user interfaces. You are expected to know about the basic operation of Drupal, and be familiar with the concept of theming and modules in Drupal. No experience of creating themes or modules is required. You will need to know the basics of client-side web development; this means HTML, CSS, but also have a rudimentary grasp of the syntax of JavaScript. Familiarity with PHP programming will be an advantage, since we will be writing PHPTemplate files and (at the end) creating Drupal modules. However, the PHP is covered thoroughly enough that even the PHP neophyte will not find the text too demanding. The book also covers the jQuery JavaScript library and its use in Drupal, but no knowledge of jQuery is expected - you will learn everything you need in this book.

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

Publisher’s description:

The first book to reveal the vulnerabilities and security issues that exist in the sites that have been built with Drupal?and how to prevent them from continuing Drupal is an open source framework and content management system that allows users to create and organize content, customize presentation, automate tasks, and manage site visitors and contributors. Authored by a Drupal expert, this is the first book to reveal the vulnerabilities and security issues that exist in the sites that have been built with Drupal?and how to prevent them from continuing. The main goal of this guide is to explain how to write code that avoids an attack in the Drupal environment, while also addressing how to proceed if vulnerability has been spotted and then regain control of security.

From the Back Cover

Uncover threats and protect your Drupal® site with proven strategies
What is the worst-case scenario if your Web site gets attacked and the security is broken? By following the strategies in this guide, you don't have to find out. It first walks you through the vulnerabilities you'll face and the steps you should take to protect a basic Drupal site. You'll then discover how to review a module to find weaknesses and fix them. And you'll learn how to keep your site running securely by implementing more advanced techniques.
Take control of your site by learning how to:

• Prevent the common ways that Drupal gets cracked
• Uncover parts of the attack surface that can expose your site
• Install extra modules and configure Drupal to maintain your site's security
• Control the security of your site using Drupal's API
• Utilize the Drupal Access system to limit who can see specific content
• Test your site with automated scanners like Grendel
• Follow strategies to find, exploit, and avoid vulnerabilities
• Leverage resources from the Drupal Security Team

For all the code in this book, as well as all the latest updates, visit the Web site http://crackingdrupal.com.

About the Author

Greg James Knaddison is Principal of Growing Venture Solutions and a dedicated Drupalista. As a member of the Drupal security team, Knaddison has participated in every part of the process including identifying vulnerabilities, creating fixes, testing fixes, and writing security documentation and advisories. He has also contributed modules and publishes the news site DrupalDashboard.com.