The Lullabot book for beginners.

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Product Description

Whether you want to build a simple blog or a complete and interactive community publishing website, this essential hands-on guide helps you do it with Drupal - the popular open source web framework and content management system. By drawing on the vast collection of community-contributed modules that make this framework unique, recipes in "Using Drupal" show how to combine modules in interesting ways (with a minimum of code-wrangling) to develop projects such as a wiki, publishing work flow site, photo gallery, product review site, online store, user group site, and more.Each chapter: describes a case study and outlines specific requirements for the featured project; highlights the Drupal concepts and key modules that the chapter introduces, with a bird's-eye view of each module's specialty and how it works; discusses various solutions within Drupal that meet your requirements for the project, with details about which modules are selected and why; demonstrates how to configure modules, with step-by-step recipes for building the precise functionality you require; suggests additional modules that will make your project even more powerful; and, provides links to the modules used in the chapter, along with other resources. Newcomers will find a thorough introduction to the framework, while experienced Drupal developers will learn best practices for building powerful websites. With "Using Drupal", you'll find concrete and creative solutions for developing the exact community website you have in mind.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34498 in Books
• Published on: 2008-12-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

About the Author
Angela Byron is an open source evangelist, and has been called a Drupal freak by those in the know. She got her start as a Google Summer of Code student in 2005 and since then, she has immersed herself in the Drupal community. Her work includes coding and reviewing patches, creating and contributing to modules and themes, testing and quality assurance efforts within the project, improving documentation, and providing user support on forums and IRC. Angela is on the Board of Directors for the Drupal Association, and helps drive community growth by leading initiatives to help get new contributors involved. She is a sought-after lecturer on many themes, especially the topic of women in Open Source.

Addison Berry is deeply involved with Drupal and takes part in many aspects of both the software and the community. She contributes patches to core Drupal, maintains several contributed modules, and is active in various mentoring programs such as the Drupal Dojo group and Google's Highly Open Participation (GHOP) program. Addison helps maintain the drupal.org website, and is a permanent member of the Drupal Association General Assembly. Her work focuses on improving Drupal documentation and she has worked to provide a wide range of tutorials covering all aspects of Drupal from community involvement to code.

Nathan Haug is one of the forefront user-interface developers in the Drupal project. His interest in combining design and software implementation led him to complete undergraduate degrees in both Visual Communications and Computer Science. Using these skills he developed significant UI improvements for the Drupal 6 release, including Drupal's drag-and-drop implementation and a framework for easy AJAX-like behaviors. Nathan is considered the leading JavaScript developer in the Drupal project. In 2007, he led a development team at SonyBMG to build a Drupal-based platform for community websites around each of SonyBMG's music artists. He spends much of his time working between popular contribute modules such as Fivestar and Webform, or working to improve functionality in Drupal core.

Jeff Eaton has been building software for the Internet and desktop applications for over a decade. He's participated in projects ranging from web-portals for communities and nonprofits, to enterprise client-server applications for retail industries, to large-scale web applications for companies like Dow AgroSciences and the Chicago Board of Trade. In 2005, he began developing solutions based on the open-source Drupal content management framework. In the years since, he's become a core developer for the Drupal project, specializing in architecture and API development. In his capacity as a consultant for Lullabot Consulting, LLC, he's helped plan and build the software infrastructure for Drupal sites including MTVUK's music portal, SonyBMG's artist site platform, and Fast Company's groundbreaking business networking site.

Passionate about both technology and teaching, James Walker is Lullabot's Director of Education where he oversees the company's public workshops, seminars and private Drupal trainings. A leader in the Drupal community, James is a founding member of the non-profit Drupal Association and the Drupal security team. As a long time member of the Drupal community, James maintains over a dozen modules and has contributed countless patches to Drupal core. A long time believer in Open Source and Open Standards, James has spent years co-ordinating Drupal's involvement with other communities such as Jabber/XMPP and, most recently, OpenID. An engaging speaker, James is a frequently requested presenter at many types of technical conferences. His humorous and informative lectures have been among the most well-attended at DrupalCons, starting with the first - four years ago.

Jeff Robbins is co-founder and CEO of Lullabot. He worked at O'Reilly & Associates as an illustrator and systems administrator as the world wide web came into being. He was involved in the early stages of the first commercial website, O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator, but left to start one of the first web design companies, Liquid Media, in 1993.

Considered by many to be the voice of Drupal, Jeff hosts Lullabot's weekly Drupal podcast, the #1 Drupal podcast in the world. Additionally, he has contributed over 20 Drupal modules and themes.

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Customer Reviews

useful for beginners
A great little book if you're just starting out with Drupal, and want to know which modules could be useful for you. I'd say if you're getting into true development stuff and want to play around with Drupal a bit more, the excellent 'Pro Drupal Development' by John VanDyk would be a much better choice.

This book was written by members of the Lullabot team, who do Drupal consulting and development work. They really know their stuff, so you feel things they suggest in this book (like choosing module x over module y) are worth listening to.

The book itself guides you through typical scenarios you might want out of a Drupal website, like wikis, a shopping cart, workflow, multilingual sites, etc, etc. Each section has some useful tips and ideas, but doesn't go into a massive amount of depth. So again, great if you're just starting out and want a flavour of what's possible.

Gret Drupal review with previous knowledge
This is a great book as most from ... if you have some knoledege of Drupal. If you have already installed your developing environment (Apache, MySQL, PHP) and got Drupal working, if you have already made some trial error webpages with Drupal then this book is for you.
The people from Lulabot know all you need for starting seriously with Drupal.
The book covers very good examples of what might want for your sites, and you can avoid the so many times made question... with so many shared modules which one fits better on my site?
The experience of its writers will drive you through the same many doubts they have solved before you.

I do recommend this book. But if what you need a beginers book for building up your first Drupal site, I would go for Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6

A great read, with meaningful "demo" sites
This book follows a nice progression of plausible demonstration websites, one per chapter, each highlighting an aspect of Drupal's functionality. It's nicely produced too (though the paper is a little thin). I've read it cover-to-cover, and look forward to reading it again, this time with computer access, to go through the worked examples.