Drupal 7 85
Trevor James writes "Drupal 7 is currently at beta 1 stage with 11 critical issues remaining to be fixed before an official release version. The question arises whether we should all be writing about Drupal 7 now and so soon, when it's still in its beta phase. I argue we should be writing about it. It can only help introduce new users to the Drupal application and the Drupal community and get new people involved to help test Drupal 7. This will ultimately help improve the software for its official release and on. This helps to build the Drupal community of users and developers. It helps spread the word to everyone about this flexible and robust content management system. We want Drupal to be used. So this is one way of getting it out there and in the public sphere." Read on for the rest of Trevor's review.
Some nuances: most developers and Drupal users adhere to the rule that if you plan to run Drupal 7 as a production site and on a production server right now you need to be aware that there may still be bugs in core Drupal 7 that will cause issues on your site. But this doesn't mean you can't use Drupal 7. You can certainly download the beta 1 release and install it on your development or localhost server and use it. And you can improve it by using it now.
| Drupal 7 | |
| author | David Mercer |
| pages | 416 |
| publisher | Packt Publishing |
| rating | 9/10 |
| reviewer | Trevor James |
| ISBN | 1849512868 |
| summary | A pragmatic look at the steps necessary to get a website up and running using Drupal 7 |
Which brings me to David Mercer's new book Drupal 7. This is the second edition of Mercer's popular Drupal 6 book, and here Mercer has had an early opportunity to update his text for Drupal 7. It's a good and important book to help promote Drupal 7 and spread the word about the Drupal project and the Drupal community to both experienced and new users. Mercer knows Drupal - remember that he's already proven himself with the Drupal (back to version 4.x and 5.x) and Drupal 6 titles previously published by Packt. The original edition of Drupal was published in 2006 so Mercer has been devoted to this subject for over 4 years.
The Drupal 7 title is good for Drupal beginners and novices who are just starting out with Drupal but it also has a wealth of information and resources for more intermediate and advanced Drupal users and developers. It gives you the full run down of Drupal core as well as details of many advanced Drupal topics including an entire chapter on the Views module. The book starts with a solid introduction to the Drupal 7 framework and community and shows detailed install instructions using the XAMPP installer. Mercer highlights the new installation profile functionality that ships with Drupal 7 (both a standard and minimal install profile) and even gives you tips on troubleshooting your install if something goes awry.
Chapter 2 outlines the details of Drupal architecture and structure including installing modules, enabling blocks and setting up menus. The highlight in this chapter are two new features in Drupal 7 that allow you to install contributed modules directly from their FTP URL/path on drupal.org; or by uploading the tar.gz archive directly via the Drupal administration interface. For anyone maintaining Drupal sites this will should be a well received enhancement.
Chapter 3 covers Drupal 7 site configuration and reporting mechanisms including setting up actions and triggers; creating shortcuts; managing the file system; configuring site performance; setting up site RSS feeds; and viewing site reports. One highlight in this chapter is the new shortcut functionality that allows you as a Drupal site admin to create sets of shortcut links for your fellow content editors and site admins. Another new feature in Drupal 7 is the ability to upload your attached files (images, PDF, doc, etc) to private folders on your site. In Drupal 6 you could restrict access to all uploaded files but not to specific files by content type (without having to install contributed modules to extend this functionality). In Drupal 7 you now have the ability to restrict access at the file field level per content type. So specific files attached via a content type can be uploaded to a private folder.
Chapter 4 explores Drupal 7 access control with a detailed walk-through of Drupal roles, permissions and user access. Mercer also includes a tutorial on using the OpenID Web service to provide single sign-on login functionality for your Drupal site.
Chapter 5 looks at setting up content workflows on your Drupal 7 site and describes all the Drupal core content types (Article, Basic page, Blog entry, Book page, Forum topic and Poll). Mercer covers content related modules including Aggregator and Book so anyone interested in setting up Web service based aggregated feeds; and multi-layer paginated content will get a lot out of this chapter. Chapter 6 deals with advanced content outlining the process of creating your own custom content types and adding custom fields; and integrating taxonomy with your content types.
Chapter 7 looks at integrating multimedia with your Drupal 7 site including images, and other types of embedded media. Drupal 7 now ships with the Image field in core so all you have to do is add an Image field to your content type. The image field now supports rotation and desaturate effects so besides scaling an image you can now rotate your images by a specific number of degrees.
Mercer includes an entire chapter on integrating the Views module with Drupal 7. The Views section even goes into detail on setting up advanced Views using arguments and relationships and shows you how to theme your Views. This is a real bonus for an introductory level book on Drupal. Anyone using the Views module even with Drupal 6 will benefit from reading this chapter.
Chapter 9 deals with Drupal theming both from the theme layer and the CSS perspectives. There is a lot of detailed information on theming using the Zen starter theme so anyone using Zen will learn some best practice theming solutions from this chapter. Chapter 10 introduces methods of integrating and using the Panels module with Drupal 7 as well as discussions of advanced theming techniques.
In general the title covers the Drupal 7 interface in much detail and points out the many new features of Drupal 7's administrative interface including the overlay admin screens; the simplified and re-named core content types including Article and Basic Page; the built-in CCK module (now part of core Drupal); the enhanced ability to install modules directly via the admin interface; and a look at the new core Drupal themes. Mercer covers best practices for deploying Drupal sites from staging locations to a production server; backup processes, and even a discussion of SEO best practice. The book even comes with quiz questions and exercises provided via the author's Web site. So you can use this title as a model for teaching Drupal 7 (and I would argue even Drupal 6) to new users. Short story - the book is loaded with good information and practical hands-on exercises.
Here's the main reason I'll recommend purchasing this book or at least knowing about it. Those 11 critical issues in Drupal 7 need to be tested, reproduced and fixed before we can use D7 on a production site and feel comfortable about with it's stability and security. We as users and developers need to help with this testing process. We can help to fix those issues by testing and reporting our findings back. This book will help us to do that by showing us how to install D7 and get rolling with it. For that I'm thankful it's been released now as opposed to 3 months from now. This is a good manual for us to use to test and bugfix this next great version of Drupal.
You know it's also just a great book and manual on using Drupal period — even the 6.x version of Drupal. You'll learn a ton about the Drupal framework from this title regardless of the version you're currently using to power your Web site.
Finally, the benefits of releasing this title now is that it will encourage both the Drupal community project and other Drupal authors to write more detailed documentation and instruction on how to use and develop with Drupal 7. We can raise Drupal 7 to a higher level by supporting its release with excellent documentation, tutorials and books.
Let's get Drupaling and help the community now by downloading Drupal 7.
Trevor James is a Drupal developer based in Maryland, USA.
You can purchase Drupal 7 from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Seriously? (Score:2, Insightful)
Drupal Drupal ... Drupal. wft is Drupal? (Score:1, Insightful)
I can tell from the book title it's something to do with websites, but it hardly helps to "spread the word" when you don't even mention in TFS what Drupal is or does?
Adverts make the front page now? (Score:3, Insightful)
This seems an awful lot like an advert to me. Should it really be on the front page?
What is Drupal? (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't bother (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's getting kinda ridiculous how authors and many books about Drupal 7were pressured into publishing early. There have been books published about software that didn't even exist at time of publication, such as Panels for Drupal 7 (they used the version from 6). Several others are publishing when there are APIs being changed to fix critical issues, and tons of new API additions still occurring. I am not even sure if Drupal 7 is in string freeze yet, and I know that visual considerations to the new themes are still on the table as well, causing all screenshots and reference to onscreen options to be at risk of being outdated. I wouldn't buy or recommend any Drupal 7 book that comes out before the release.
I was in talks over a year ago with an acquisitions editor at a another major publisher that had only done 2 Drupal books at the time, and they wanted to get started on Drupal 7 books early since they say that Drupal books were really picking up (or that their competitors were putting lots of energy into Drupal books). The problem was, that the folks of course know nothing of the open source software ecosystem and require deadlines and schedules which are simply impossible to predict with volunteer software development. My editor wanted to have my chapters by March of 2010, so they could hit the shelves and announce at DrupalCon San Francisco in April. They were convinced that a release of D7 would happen in Fall of '09. I told them, that the release would never happen in 09 and probably not in Q1 of '10 and that getting a comprehensive API reference (I was estimating around 800-900 pages) by that time would be a stretch. They ended up passing on the offer, since they felt the timeline was wrong, and that Joomla and Wordpress downloads were better.
I am also sick of all these books that cover Drupal 7 or other similar software are a very cursory level. I'd much rather wait for Pro Drupal Development 3rd edition to come out, when it's a book whose authors have spent thousands of hours maintaing community contributions, and they have hundreds of patches to Drupal itself.
Re:Adverts make the front page now? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a fine line between "product news" and "astroturf".
Hint: if you local news channel is doing an in-depth week-long series of segments on botox, you can bet they didn't film or write a word of it, and aren't relying on ad revenue to pay for it.
11 critical issues (Score:3, Insightful)
What are the 11 critical issues? Or more precisely, could they ruin the book?
I can imagine, perhaps, one of them being RSS feeds written in Klingon with backdated pre 1970 timestamps having the wrong rules of Klingon punctuation. That's all very fascinating, but since I don't care, I won't mind that the book doesn't cover that particular critical issue.
But what if one of the 11 critical issues is some deep core framework type of thing that will require changes in everything?
Inviting a newbie to learn on a buggy system just annoys the newbie. So unlike the review, I'd suggest a newbie learn on a fully patched version 6 Drupal. Getting stuck and not being able to figure out if its my code or a Drupal 7 prerelease bug is an excellent recruitment tool for RoR, not for Drupal 7.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
I do have to question the wisdom of the submitter when he suggests the perfect way to get new people into using Drupal is to have them help test Drupal 7. That seems like exactly the wrong way to do it. If someone who has never seen Drupal before is first exposed to it via a buggy development release they're going to throw it out in frustration and try something else. Betas are for people already interested in and/or using your product, not for people you're trying to convert.
CMSs are Evil (Score:1, Insightful)
>>The question arises whether we should all be writing about Drupal 7
Don't. CMS's are evil and lull "designers" into thinking they are developers and cms developers into thinking they are programmers, snarf, snarf!
Re:Finally! (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been telling people that Drupal 7 is coming real soon now for two years! We've developed and redeveloped entire sites, all the while hearing from our developers that Drupal 7 was coming out and that we would need to think about our upgrade path.
As far as I can tell it's vaporware. Release it already.