Product Description

Drupal is the premier open source content management system available. It is used for high profile sites such as TheOnion.com and has been deployed by organizations such as NASA. Utilizing Drupal, you can create your own personal blog, a community driven site like Slashdot, or any other content oriented web site you can imagine.
Pro Drupal Development is a book geared to professionals that need to deploy and customize Drupal. This book delves deep into the internals of the Drupal system and teaches the reader everything they will need to know to deploy a highly customized and optimized Drupal installation. Every web developer looking to deploy web sites quickly to their clients while still being able to harness the power of an excellent content management system needs this book.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #191379 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 428 pages

About the Author
John VanDyk has been a Drupal developer since 2004. In 2005 he organized
the first Drupal conference in Antwerp, Belgium with Drupal founder Dries
Buytaert. He 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.

Matt Westgate is a core developer of the Drupal project and original author
the ecommerce package for Drupal. Matt also wrote the path aliasing module,
along with many contributed modules such as tinymce and img_assist.
Currently he and Jeff Robbins operate Lullabot, a consulting/training firm
focused on making open source software easy to use and understand.

Customer Reviews

Read this to really start understanding Drupal
This is one of the best IT books I've bought and read and i did read it cover to cover. This is actually the third drupal book i have bought as i love drupal and really think it is a brilliant product. Being a relatively non-technical person who really wants to use drupal on some future projects i needed to understand things such as hooks, themes, and module development. What this book did was to give me an understanding on how drupal works, structure of themes and modules and what hooks are and the function they perform. That i could not learn from going through the handbooks on the drupal website.

So if you really want to begin to understand the technical aspects of drupal then this is the book to buy. And to an earlier reviewer who said the book does not specify the version it deals with. Truly it does not but when you start reading it you will see that it focuses on Drupal 5 and later this year it is being updated to cater for drupal 6.

I personally want to say thanks to John Vandyk and Matt Westgate for writing such a wonderful book on a really awesome tool. And to all the good guys who have made drupal what it is today. Keep up the great work. And a big thank you to Dries.

Author/Publisher: Why not state what version the book is for?
When writing on a subject such as software, which by its very nature will always be evolving and getting better, I know of no books that do not state for what version the book is for. If the version is not stated then using another software as an example, Oracle RDBMS version 9 may be for Oracle 10g, the difference between the two versions is vast and you do not see Oracle 9 books being sold any longer. All old versions of Oracle books phase out very quickly, it is the same for Microsoft software and many others.

Hence, can anyone answer the question why does this book does not state the version of the software it is for?

Before answering, note that on the Drupal web site books for version 6 are due to be published in February 2008 and Amazon have not offered a pre-ordering service for them. Also keep in mind that for such a wonderful piece of software there are very few books covering the subject, there is not even a Dummies book for it.

On this, for a competing piece of software, Joomla, a Dummies book will be available in February 2008 and for which Amazon are offering a pre-ordering service.

As high as the ratings are on the USA Amazon.com web site for this book, and I have ordered it even knowing Drupal 6 and updated books are coming out soon, the competition it has does not match that for other mainstream software and it is this that has caused me to purchase a book I know will be out of date soon.

Would it be fair to assume that the publishers/authors are aware of this? If so then is it not fair to ask if they may be taking advantage of this fact by taking the highly unusual decision to not state the version that the software is for?

So if anyone has a communication channel to the authors/publishers can they pass those questions to them and let us hear it from the horses mouth.

Going by the reviews I have read, I am looking forward to getting this book, I have little doubt it will be as good as the reviews I have read say it is and when I update this review, I am sure I will be singing its praises too.

However, I would ask the authors/publishers to explain how this book is going to benefit someone when Drupal version 6 and then 7 are released? How are they to know for what version this book is for without reading reviews? Why not follow all other books written about software and state the version it is for?

I can state now that I and many others would not purchase it if all it covers is version 5 once the new versions are released.

Will update my review if I get an answer from the publishers/authors and maybe Amazon for not offering a pre-ordering service for Drupal version 6 books.

A great book for CMS professionals new to Drupal
This is a thoroughly professional book from cover to cover. Concise and well written throughout. Each chapter has an Introduction section at the start and a Summary section at the end that tells you what you should be capable of after reading it. This can save a huge amount of time when you need to home in on a particular nugget.
Its scope embraces the supporting technologies which Drupal uses, even providing a working introduction to Ajax and Jquery.
This book is ideal for those already familiar with PHP and MySQL/PostgreSQL who are investigating content management solutions. It reveals the thoroughly professional approach, power and stature of the Drupal system to such an extent that after reading it, they should be convinced that it would be a Herculean task to design a package that compares favourably to Drupal.