Pro Drupal Development

Michael J. Ross writes "If a Web site needs to be developed as quickly as possible, or it needs to support collaborative content, then usually the best approach is to use a content management system (CMS). There are many CMSs from which a Web developer could choose, including Drupal, which is considered by many to be the most powerful, extensible, and logically organized of them all. Installing Drupal and using it to create a simple site, is fairly straightforward, in part due to its relatively excellent documentation. For much of its existence, there has been far less information available on how to extend a Drupal site with one's own modules, themes, blocks, etc. That need is now met by a new book, Pro Drupal Development." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.

Pro Drupal Development
author	John K. VanDyk and Matt Westgate
pages	428
publisher	Apress
rating	9
reviewer	Michael J. Ross
ISBN	1590597559
summary	A detailed guide to customizing a Drupal-based Web site

The book was written by John K. VanDyk and Matt Westgate, both of whom are experienced computer programmers, who years earlier had created their own CMS. In their book's Introduction, they confess to discovering Drupal and its many advantages, switching over to it, and presumably abandoning further development of their own CMS. This speaks volumes about their regard for Drupal, because an individual programmer or programming team can give no greater vote of confidence for a technological product than to voluntarily end primary allegiance to a competing product that they themselves birthed and nurtured.

Pro Drupal Development was published by Apress, on 16 April 2007, under the ISBNs 1590597559 and 978-1590597552. The publisher offers a Web page on their site dedicated to the book, where the visitor will find all of the book's source code, as well as the table of contents and a sample chapter (Chapter 8 — The Theme System), in PDF format. In addition, there is a link for errata, which leads to the authors' own book site. At the time of this writing, there are three dozen entries, contributed by the authors and their readers. The authors' site also has links for downloading the source code by individual chapter, and a blog that focuses on the book.

The book's material, spanning 428 pages, is organized into 23 chapters and two appendices. Unlike the majority of technical books nowadays, this one does not have the chapters organized into labeled parts. Nonetheless, the chapters and appendices roughly fall into three categories: how Drupal works (Chapters 1, 19, and 23, and Appendix A), how to customize it (Chapters 2-18 and 22), and how to optimize your Drupal development efforts (Chapters 20-21, and Appendix B). The customization chapters cover a wide range of topics: modules, menus, databases, users, nodes, themes, blocks, forms, filtering, searching, indexing, files, taxonomy, caching, sessions, jQuery, localization, and optimization.

Each one of these topics is explored in laudable detail, with plenty of sample code and figures to illustrate the key concepts. The greatest strength of this book is the depth of its coverage, and the methodical way that the authors go about presenting the material. They are clearly quite serious about Drupal itself, and about conveying to the reader all of the knowledge that they believe is important for the reader to master. In fact, anyone attempting to read the book cover to cover might find the presentation quite dry, with no evidence of humor or even a sense of fun, unlike so many other recent programming books. On the other hand, one can argue that the value of this information alone to the reader who is equally serious about mastering Drupal, should be sufficient. Regardless, be warned that this is definitely not a book that one can read through at a fast pace, absorbing the bulk of the information. The innards of Drupal alone make it a challenging subject for dissection; learning how to modify Drupal's behavior, is even more so.

Yet if anyone is interested in mastering the inner workings of Drupal, and how to customize them, this is the book of choice. It may be a bit dry, but it is quite meaty, and the material is clearly presented. Moreover, the publisher, Apress, has done an admirable job with this title. The layout is clear; the index is substantial; and, as with their other titles, they offer two different versions of the table of contents — high-level, listing the chapter titles only, and detailed, listing the sections and subsections within those chapters.

Another aspect of this book that I applaud is the efficient use of page space, through the use of top and bottom margins that are noticeably smaller than those found in the typical computer programming book. This is especially true of the bottom margins. For instance, on page 117, the text comes within one centimeter of the bottom edges the page — something I've never seen before in a professionally printed book. At first it might strike one as sloppy, but actually should be appreciated by anyone who is tired of technical books using excessive margins for padding out a much more limited amount of information into an even greater number of pages. This is a practice that I would recommend to all other publishers, technical or otherwise.

However, the book does have some weaknesses, which is probably to be expected in any first edition. The sample source code in many cases could benefit from more use of whitespace — particularly for the PHP code. But with any code found in a book, there is always the possibility that such instances of compressed code result from a conscious decision given the limited width of the printed page. But in most such cases in this book, that reason would not be applicable.

The authors do not warn the reader that a solid understanding of PHP is needed for using the book's ideas and sample code. Near the end of the Introduction, they suggest that if the reader is new to Drupal, then he or she should read the chapters in sequence. The authors should also note that if the reader is new to PHP, then it would be better to first get up to speed on PHP before trying to digest and make use of this book. Such points might be obvious to most readers, but they should be clarified up front, perhaps in the Introduction, for the benefit of anyone browsing this title in a bookstore, and wondering if they already possess the technical know-how required by the book.

Similarly, the authors also do not mention that the book is, for the most part, only applicable to Drupal version 5, and not version 4 or earlier versions, since there have been some dramatic changes with the release of version 5. In fact, given the extent of the changes and how that would impact the utility of the book depending upon what version of Drupal the reader is using, it should be noted on the book's cover, as an increasing number of publishers are doing.

A couple of minor problems were in evidence in the first dozen pages. On page 3, the authors refer to "user 1," which is likely to confuse most readers, because it looks like a username, and would be unfamiliar to someone who has installed Drupal and created a Web site, without extensive reading of the Drupal documentation. On page 11, the authors discuss core modules, and where they can be seen listed in the administration area of Drupal. But the path that they provide, "sites/all/modules," is incorrect, because that is where user-added modules are placed, of which there are none in a default installation. (The second mention of that path, in the fourth paragraph, is correct.)

Lastly, when the book is opened up to any of the pages not near the center, the book immediately flops closed. The use of lay-flat binding is strongly urged, for future editions of this book and all others that Apress offers.

Despite these weaknesses — all of which are fixable — Pro Drupal Development is strongly recommended for any PHP programmer who wants a truly in-depth look at how Drupal works and how to make the most of it.

Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, freelance writer, and the editor of PristinePlanet.com's free newsletter.

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You can purchase Pro Drupal Development from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

relatively excellent?

in part due to its relatively excellent documentation

Nice term... So, depending on the base, the same thing could also be called relatively shitty, or relatively mediocre? Indeed, it can...

Everything is relative, is not it? So why say it?

Re:relatively excellent?

I like Drupal. It has a dedicated security team. That helps me sleep at night.

I like that each bit of HTML content that Drupal puts out (like the user login form, for example) and be easily overridden or modified without changing any core code (I just make a template file and do it there and Drupal automatically sees it).

I like that the output from Drupal is already in semantically meaningful CSS classes. If I want to tweak the way the breadcrumbs look, I just override the breadcrumb class in my own style.css file. Ditto for titles, menus, etc.

Joomla For the Win

Okay... so I've used both Drupal and Joomla, but I think Joomla has the biggest future right now, especially with Beta 1.5release2 having just been unleashed soon. Joomla has a huge following behind it since it garnered a lot of attention when they broke off from Mambo awhile back. Now there are hundreds or thousands of extensions available for your website and really high quality themes. Just look at the demos on http://rockettheme.com/ [rockettheme.com] if you want proof.
With my personal statement said... I have nothing against Drupal or this documentation. If people enjoy using Drupal to develop sites then all the power to them.

Re:Joomla For the Win

I looked a Mambo a few years ago and the code was pretty much as bad as I could imagine. It was so poorly written that I didn't even install it to try it out.

Drupal, on the other hand, is extremely well written as Dries is very strict about submissions to the core. I know Drupal inside and out and that's only possible because it's very well written and documented. An entire site is dedicated just the automatically generated API documentation.

Glad to See

Glad to see the

reviewer is paying

attention the ample

margins throughout the

book. It helps me

make a purchasing

decision, I really

only ever buy books

with good margins.

M

"logically organized"?

Logically organized? That's a funny phrase; Most of us who have programmed know that logic != intuitive. Just take a look at any interface designed by a programmer. It's logically organized, but intuitive? Hardly every. /pedantic

Closed comment

Timesprout post an insightful comment on this article which included a detailed explanation of why 42 is the answer to everything, what the ?? in step 2 of the 3 steps to profit meme really is and how to easily fill Natalie Portman's pants with hot grits, and even better, how to then get her to remove those pants.

However Timesprout failed to use lay-flat text for his comment and it flopped closed as soon as it was posted which means no one can read it unfortunately.

Slashdot Ed.

Drupal on Dr. Dobbs

It should be noted that the first chapter of the book is available on Dr. Dobb's [ddj.com] and gives a good overview of what Drupal is and how it works.

MediaWiki

I'm the Administrator of my school's homepage and I use the software MediaWiki [mediawiki.org] also used by Wikipedia. Of course, it's designed mainly for community projects such as Wikipedia and Wikia [wikia.com]-Wikis but it works equally well with few editors. And you have the big advantage of being able to open up your homepage, making it editable by others (in my case, the teachers and perhaps even students).

What I don't like about Joomla and all those WYSIWYG [wikipedia.org]-Editors is, that the homepage is not standardized. Every editor has his own way of formatting and making headlines and so you get many pieces instead of _one_ homepage. With MediaWiki you just enter
== Headline ==
and every headline looks the same.
IMHO, MediaWiki is a great choice, particularly if you have more than one editor.

Whitespace

The sample source code in many cases could benefit from more use of whitespace -- particularly for the PHP code.

I haven't read the book, so I don't know which direction they have gone, but this either means that they are following or breaching the Drupal conventions for code formatting. Drupal has an entire document on coding standards [drupal.org], and someone who HAS seen the book could perhaps comment on whether the examples follow the standards or not...

Just discovered Drupal

I just tried Drupal for the first time a few weeks ago whenever Google was having problems with their personalized site and I wanted to make a self-hosted equivalent. I have to say that it's just about the slickest CMS I've played with. I installed a couple of modules, configured everything through the web admin, and got my own personal My Yahoo! workalike.

I liked Plone but it always felt over-engineered and sluggish. Drupal, on the other hand, seems light and quick. I don't really have much else to add the the conversation, except to say that it's worth trying if you're looking at CMSes.

Oh CMS up yours..

I got fed up babysitting all the material on our commercial website where the staff were hacking away with Dreamweaver 2 (10 euros on ebay) and I was developing it with the ridiculously complex and effing expensive Dreamweaver 8 (they could reduce a 200 page library entry to shreds with a single keystroke) so I found Mambo, checked it out set it up on our development site and then asked the staff to try it. No one could understand it.
Found PHPwebsite, set it up on our development website, asked the staff to test it, they thought it lovely, intutitive but a tad clunky looking.
Then it crashed for no identifiable reason so we had a long hiatus while I installed Moodle on our development website, asked the staff to try it and despite their now healthy scepticism they did and loved it. "Can't we have a cms like this?" Er no.
Then Mambo and Joomla split - ho, here we go this is bound to lead to an interface that could convince the staff to use it. So I installed Joomla on our etc, ad nauseum, ad infinitum, no one could understand it, the learning curve belonged to the NASA Mars Mission and neither I nor any other member if staff with geek credentials to hack Joomla into submission had the time or energy to do so.
Incredibly sad because our Business Manager just loved both Joomla and Mambo as brand names to be associated with. When I think of all those Joomla/Mambo plug-ins such as the remository, they make me drool!
But the Mythical Man-Month (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man_Mon th) is ever present.
Product boxes, net library, customer database, flash media and Lord knows what else piles up me and I forget CMS for about three months. Then the US elections arrived and I read a discussion about about Civic CMV (or whatever it is called, I can't be bother googling it at this time of night - BB's on for starters) and I read all the Drupal stuff and thought hmmm, I wonder.
Well Drupal works for the staff, it is a reasonably friendly interface, staff can understand a lot of the cracked geek node stuff and it plugs in with loads of stuff and although it is high-maintenance it isn't the absolutely Betty Blue - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Blue [wikipedia.org] - level of High Maintenance that the other champ CMSs were. IMHO it has vast potential and with each release, the interface gets better and better. I feel that Civic is among one of the driving forces behind it, although I don't even use that module, and the opportunity for users to contribute is on an entry level slightly lower than the other CMSs I mentioned.
I am fairly certain that I won't be buying this book however, the development of the print edition is never going to be able to keep up with the pace of the application.
Would anyone like to buy my Ubuntu Hacks for version 6 for example. It should be completely useless in 6 months when whatever fluffy edition is released then - and we will update too!

IBM tutorial

Even IBM gives short tutorial on how to develop with Drupal.
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/osource/ implement.html [ibm.com]

e107?

I did some extensive research for an open source CMS for my WoW guild. I ended up choosing e107 [e107.org] and I couldn't be happier. It's a pretty dang good CMS.

For those of you looking at CMSs... the site Open Source CMS [opensourcecms.com] is an invaluable resource. They allow you to demo all of the popular choices and choose which one you like the best.

Drupal version?

I can't find out what version of Drupal the authors based this book on. Anyone know?

Some additional comments on the book and Drupal

I got the book and it has been helpful in distilling down the massive amount of information available about Drupal development. I see Drupal's strength as a framework for building your own applications on top, due to the design of the module and add-on system. I've also used Joomla/Mambo and both can provide a strong CMS for your website. The primary difference lies in whether you want an as much out of the box functionality as you can get (Joomla/Mambo) or if you want some out of the box functionality with easier potential to add in your own functionality or tweak existing functionality more easily. (Drupal)

It was interesting to see the one comment about users having an easier time with Drupal than with Joomla, based on my usage of the drupal.org site and my own Joomla site, I could see that scenario very easily. Joomla did take me some time to get my mind wrapped around how content is organized while with Drupal I'm having a slightly easier time organizing the content and manipulating it into my organization instead of a firm Drupal defined structure.

And on the book, I did find it helpful, but I would've like more information on populating the content from PHP code, I'm currently working on a couple of projects where I need to automatically populate content and the book was not helpful on that aspect. However, it was very helpful as I customize my installation and get my modules setup to work with Drupal.

Off-topic Drupal question

I just bought the Nintendo DS Browser (Opera), and the sole problem I have with it is that it doesn't store passwords or cookies. Is there a way to bookmark a login URL for Drupal so that I don't have to manually log in each time? I've tried replacing the POST with a GET in the normal login form, but I'm guessing that it expects some cookies to be set before you can actually submit that.

Bonus points and a case of beer for anyone who knows how to write a Squid plugin to store and transmit cookies on a per-user, authenticated basis.

SilverStripe CMS, Drupal & Joomla

Great to see books like this emerge around an opensource product like Drupal. We powered our main blog on Drupal for a couple of years and found it pretty cool, and built heaps of sites in Joomla, and they're both cool, Drupal is a bit hard on non-technical end users though, but over the last 6 months we have moved over to a pretty cool AJAX filled Opensource CMS Silverstripe http://www.silverstripe.com/ [silverstripe.com]. Silverstripe has only been opensource for about 9 months, but its hit the OSS shelf as a clean code base which is very easy to use as its come out of a cool young web company who were sick of there being thousands of CMS's and every web company having there own.

There are definitely heaps of 3rd party modules available for Joomla and increasingly for drupal, and that was a big part of the attraction for us moving to use them, but we found in the end you find that many of them aren't quite right, they're great to get you inspired and have something to play with in 5 minutes, but projects need to be completed just right, so you often still have to develop something from scratch.

If you're into Drupal and the best open source CMS's then SilverStripe is definitely worth checking out.

Experiences of drupal

I've used drupal, and although my first impressions were positive, the further I delved the more disappointed I became. If you want it to look and work just like it came in the box then fine, but if you want to add any functionality at all you need to get to grips with an incredibly convoluted API and call hierarchy. I'm not saying it's worse than any of the others out there, just that it's not that great either. quote: "Installing Drupal and using it to create a simple site, is fairly straightforward, in part due to its relatively excellent documentation." The documentation is fragmented, written by multiple unqualified authors and badly organized. It speaks volumes about the drupal approach that their own site has the poorest information architecture I've come across. Even finding your own posts on the forums can be a nightmare. For some types of content, user generated taxonomy navigation is great, but it doesn't work for (a) documentation or (b) forum posts. I'm not trying to troll here, this has been my honest experience. I wasted two weeks on drupal, trying to get it to do what I needed it to do. In the end we decided to go it alone and develop our own CMS type platform because it would take less time than doing it with drupal, and it has indeed proved the case. Perhaps now there's a decent book on drupal development it'll become an easier platform to develop on, but I've not read the book so I can't comment.

Drupalbook.com

Buy the book from http://www.drupalbook.com/ [drupalbook.com] help support the Drupal project!

Re:I've said it before and I'll say it again

Damn right.

Real web developers make their sites using Assembly! Screw those lame high level languages.

MySQL? Bah! I store my databases in txt files like a real man.

Re:I've said it before and I'll say it again

Pah. I answer all of my HTTP GET requests personally, by hand. It makes dynamic content so much easier.

Re:Blog package

Drupal can be used for blogging, but it's more likely to be used as the framework for a community site. If all you want is a blog, you're better off with Wordpress. If you want a site that starts out as a basic "about us" site then morphs into a discussion forum that sells shoes and plots the resulting sales using Google Maps (only for users living in Ohio; users living in other states get different permissions) then Drupal is the way to go.

Re:The theory and the practice

Writing your own library/classes like that (I do the same) also lets you avoid the cookie-cutter vulnerabilities out there. The big CMS offerings are prime targets for those. I don't have any installed, and I get lines in my apache log for them all the damn time.

Re:Drupal Optimization == oxymoron

Or they might want to read the 22nd chapter of the book. It's titled Optimizing Drupal and deals with performance and scalability. Many high-profile sites, such as ubuntu.com, have scaled Drupal. You can see some of them here [buytaert.net].

Re:Drupal Optimization == oxymoron

Wow I guess The Onion, Tim Berners-Lee blog and the little corner of the web where I work [splendora.com] don't scale and are horrible messes of spaghetti code.

Oh wait, they're not. Troll.

Re:Drupal Optimization == oxymoron

A few of the organizations that use Drupal on a large scale successfully:

http://www.mtv.co.uk/ [mtv.co.uk]
http://www.theonion.com/ [theonion.com]
http://dead.net/ [dead.net] (The Grateful Dead site)
http://goingon.com/ [goingon.com] (Forbes. Yes, that Forbes.)
http://playboy.de/ [playboy.de] (Playboy Germany, NSFW)
http://www.fighthunger.org/ [fighthunger.org] (The UN)

And that's just the first few I remembered. Drupal scales just fine if you know what you're doing. If you don't, then you won't be able to make anything scale.

Re:Drupal Optimization == oxymoron

IMHO, drupal is the best open source cms, powerfull and flexible, with lot of features. Also has very strong community, and a lot of community contributed modules and themes (take look at Drupal Theme Garden [themegarden.org]).

Another thing: even the inventor of the HTML -- Tim Berners Lee -- uses Drupal for his personal Blog (http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/blog/4 [mit.edu])

Re:Pronunciation?

Drupal

Re:Drupal Optimization == oxymoron

Actually, why don't you get started on the upgrading and working with forms in Drupal. I would love to see some input on those.

We've been using Drupal for over a year now. Both small and medium sized projects. It's just a really really good framework. Possible -the- best right now.

Since you didn't bother to actually show any examples of what "sucks so much" I won't bother to make any arguments for why "it rocks" :)

Re:Static page generation

Is it possible to generate static web pages by Drupal? If this is not possible by Drupal, which open source CMS can satisfy my requirement?

Alternatively, you could park the whole thing behind a Squid reverse proxy, or even use Apache's own caching. One tenth the effort and all the performance.

Re:Static page generation

Is it possible to generate static web pages by Drupal?

Two ways:

• Semi-static. Use the built-in caching mechanism. First time a content is accessed, it is cached to db. 2nd time, grab the entire output from db. When content is updated, appropriate caches are flushed. This is something MySQL's MyISAM tables are excellent for. Oh, how to use? Just turn it on from the admin pages.
• Just use drupal on development site, and wget -r, script/fix the links, and rsync it to production. Don't run drupal on production.

OTOH, if you want certain pages pregenerated, and others not, just plonk down your static content on a separate subdirectory on drupal. They'd co-exist nicely. Might be more work to make sure they absolutely sync'd up though.