How should I read this book?

This book is divided into separate parts:

• Part A covers basic concepts and skills you need to have when using Drupal. Each chapter in part A ends with a number of exercises or tasks you can use to put the concepts into practice.
• Part B covers some of the more challenging aspects of the functionality provided by Drupal. It also covers the Views module – an important step in understanding and leveraging the power of Drupal. The chapters in part B end with more extensive exercises, requiring more time than the tasks in part A.
• Part C is a sequel you should use when you are comfortable with the concepts in part B. Three new modules are presented, each of them an important key when building Drupal sites. The point of part C is more of a reference and less of a narrative, but examples of how to use the modules are provided in separate boxes and in the exercises at the end of each chapter.
• Appendix 1 covers how to install Drupal, modules and themes. It also presents an approach for how to version control your configuration in Drupal.
• Appendix 2 covers how to use Drupal in languages other than English.

TIP: Throughout this book there are comments written in boxes like this. They contain some more advanced tips that you may appreciate the second or third time you read a section – you could safely skip them on your first read.

The exercise suites

This book contains a large number of exercises and tasks which you can use to practice your new Drupal skills. All tasks and exercises belong to an exercise suite. There are three suites:

• The Boss suite is used in part A, where a fictional boss provides you with comparatively straightforward tasks. The purpose of these tasks is for you to try out Drupal's administrative and editorial interface – not to build complete websites.
• The Documentation site suite spans parts B and C, building a website used by a community for online documentation. Though the exercises fit together in both functionality and theme, most of the exercises only require that you have the installation. You are not forced to do all exercises in sequence, or do them at all.
• The News site suite also spans parts B and C, building a website used for publishing news. These exercises are suitable for anyone who wants to spend more time exploring and trying different solutions in Drupal. While each exercise is described with a user story and how-to-demo instructions, there are no suggested solutions and only a few comments.

Exercises and user stories

The exercises in the Documentation site and News site suites (in parts B and C) are presented as user stories. A user story is a way of describing development tasks that is increasingly common in web development and software development in general. The core of a user story is a short description of what a particular type of site user wants to do on the website. Describing tasks as user stories helps focus on the actual point of the functionality, rather than on technical solutions.

User stories are an important part of agile development methods, a central concept in modern software development. You can find a quick introduction to agile development on Wikipedia.

The News site suite only contains brief user story information, while the Documentation site has rich descriptions to help you get going, including:

• A short but descriptive title, making it easier to find and remember the exercise.
• The actual user story for the exercise. This is a statement about who should be able to do something, what they should do, and why the functionality is desired. The why is considered important in agile development, since it helps developers choose among different solutions.
• A screenshot displaying an example end result.
• A how to demo section. You should carry out these steps to ultimately decide if the user story has been completed or not. Often these steps include details about the task that are not mentioned in the short user story – make sure you read these sections!
• Any required preparations. These are limited to short and easy tasks. No extra preparations are necessary if all tasks are carried out in sequence. (See below for details about the suites of exercises.)
• A suggested solution, intended to be the most natural way of solving the task. Each step in the solution points to relevant sections in the book where you can read about how this step works.
• Comments pointing out details that may have been missed or alternative approaches for a solution.

The suggested solutions are intended to be the most natural ones, but it is possible that there are other solutions that are better from a certain perspective. There are even cases where the exercises are intentionally written this way.

”At the time of writing”

This book was started just a few days before Drupal 7 was released in its first stable version. At that point, there were many modules (plugins) available in more or less stable versions, and many more were waiting on the starting blocks for their Drupal 7 versions. The examples in this book are based on what was available when the book was written, although a few cases also describe functionality expected to be available at the time of the release of this book.

It is likely that many of these issues will be solved when you read this book.

TIP: Since this book is now in the Drupal community documentation, you are free to update and improve the book.