Drupal’s Building Blocks

01/26/2011 · No Responses

“Even if you’re already a seasoned Drupal user of CCK, Views, or Panels, I’ve no doubt that this book will provide you with several new techniques and methods for getting the most out of these extremely essential modules. It certainly has for me.”
—Dries Buytaert, founder and project lead of Drupal, and CTO of Acquia

With Drupal, Web professionals can create full-featured Web sites with just a few clicks. Drupal’s core is compact and well documented, but much of Drupal’s immense power lies elsewhere—in external modules. Drupal’s Building Blocks is an authoritative tutorial, reference, and cookbook for Drupal’s most valuable modules.

The authors are Drupal insiders who’ve spent years creating and supporting these modules—Earl Miles, developer of the Views and Panels modules, and Lynette Miles, Drupal documentation team member. They’ve brought together indispensable information you won’t find anywhere else, as well as extensive sample “recipe” code designed for easy adaptation and reuse. Learn how to

Use Content Construction Kit (CCK) to customize your data input forms around your needs
Improve site flexibility with Drupal’s node system
Add optional field types, including PHP-based fields
Customize themes to display data more attractively and legibly
Build powerful Views query displays
Integrate with SQL databases
Customize Views with relationships, arguments, and filters
Optimize query performance
Add custom styles with the Panels module
Maintain full control over sites as you deploy into production

This book will help you create more powerful, flexible, usable, and manageable Web sites—whether you’re a Web developer, designer, administrator, architect, or consultant.

The accompanying Web site contains all examples, code, and themes presented in this book.

Table of Contents
Part I: Content Construction Kit
Chapter 1. Introducing CCK and Nodes
Chapter 2. Field Concepts
Chapter 3. Deeper into Fields
Chapter 4. Themes and CCK
Chapter 5. CCK API

Part II: Views
Chapter 6. Relational Databases
Chapter 7. Creating Views
Chapter 8. Arguments, Exposed Filters, and Relationships
Chapter 9. Theming Views
Chapter 10. Query Optimization
Chapter 11. Views API

Part III: Panels
Chapter 12. Introducing Panels
Chapter 13. Creating Panels
Chapter 14. Contexts, Relationships, and Arguments in Panels
Chapter 15. Panels Theming
Chapter 16. Site Deployment

Part IV: Appendices
Appendix A. Other Useful Modules
Appendix B. Reporting Issues
Appendix C. Views API Handlers and Plugins