New Book: Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting

Prentice Hall has just released Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting, authored by Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Käfer. This is a book to teach readers how to customize how Drupal looks, with a special focus on Drupal 6 and its new theme engine. Emma Jane and Konstantin cover everything you need to know to create great visual designs and interactivity with Drupal's behaviors, themes, and templates. They show how to style Drupal sites, make the most of its powerful templating system, build sophisticated community sites, streamline site management and build more portable and flexible themes. Also included are several case studies that walk thru the customization of everything from page templates to Web site forms.

Here's a chapter breakdown (as excerpted from the Preface):

Chapter 1

This chapter covers the basics of Web page design. It will help you to prepare information so that it will slide easily into a Drupal Web site. You will learn how to describe content and its organization; structure page layouts so that all of your interface components fit sanely onto your Web pages; and implement a work flow that works for your Drupal team.

Chapter 2

With the basics of Web design under your belt, it is time to prepare your workstation for Drupal theming. In this chapter, you will learn about Drupal terminology and theming strategies as well as must-have modules and browser tools. Chapter 2 also includes language references for each of the machine languages used in creating a Drupal theme.

Chapter 3

Readers will now move on to learning the basic anatomy of a Drupal theme. In Chapter 3, you will learn how to find and install a premade Drupal theme. You will also learn the anatomy of a Drupal theme and discover how to use Starter Themes to reduce your development time. Tips are included on how to convert themes from WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal 5.x.

Chapter 4

The overall structure of pages in Drupal is defined by the page template. In this chapter, you will learn how to customize every part of this template—from using sitewide page variables and menus, to changing page templates based on the section you are currently in. Information on print-friendly templates and mobile devices is also included in this chapter.

Chapter 5

It's time to get to the guts of your Web site—so in Chapter 5, you will learn how to customize your Web site content, including individual nodes and teaser summaries. This chapter also describes the most appropriate image module to use for your Web site. Examples of output are provided to help you make the best decision for your content.

Chapter 6

The most commonly overlooked area in Drupal theme design is content editing forms. In this chapter, you will learn simple tips and tricks to make your forms more usable and will get a gentle introduction to altering forms with the Form API. Techniques described in this chapter will help you to enhance the usability of your content editing forms.

Chapter 7

If you are running a community site, this chapter is a must—it includes information on how to theme user profiles, community comments, and user-generated content. Additional information is provided on creating private, member-only sections to your Web site.

Chapter 8

In this chapter, which covers administrative interfaces, you will learn how to make the administration of Drupal a little bit easier. Techniques include creating custom administrative interfaces, adding task-based navigation, creating administrative menus, and customizing your Web site’s error messages.

Chapter 9

In this chapter, you will acquire the JavaScript skills required for writing truly stunning, portable, and flexible components for your theme. Basic concepts or advanced object orientation—there’s certainly something you'll learn in this chapter.

Chapter 10

An introduction to jQuery, the JavaScript library that ships with Drupal, will bring you up to speed with today's most prevalent JavaScript library. You'll also learn how jQuery is used in Drupal, how you can create stunning animations, and how you can implement AJAX callbacks to the server.

Chapter 11

In this chapter, you will learn how to apply your newfound JavaScript and jQuery knowledge to a Drupal Web site. By creating a horizontal scroller component, you'll learn step by step how to architect a highly flexible and reusable JavaScript widget. Additional information in this chapter includes server-side JavaScript integration and an excursion into the vast supply of ready-made jQuery plugins.

Appendices

Information on how to install Drupal and contributed modules is included in Appendix A. Appendix B contains the code samples that are referenced in the JavaScript chapters. These code samples can also be downloaded from the book’s Web site.

The book assumes readers are familiar with how Drupal works and that they’ve administered a Drupal web site; it uses code snippets written in HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript.

Some Early Praise

Dries Buytaert wrote the foreword for the book in which he says, ….

“Drupal has always been a developer’s platform, even with the many designers in our ranks. It’s about time those designers had a great book. In fact, this book is valuable not just to the designers we have, but to the designers we want….” Dries goes on to cite a survey he conducted in 2008 which listed “Finding skilled Drupal designers” as the top entry on the list of the “Top five most difficult things,” according to both expert and novice users.

Addison Berry, Documentation Team Lead for Drupal, and co-author of Using Drupal (O’Reilly, Dec. 2008), wrote a thorough review in which she said,

“…..for people who are new to Drupal this is a freaking gem. Don't think that this is only for newbs though, not at all. This is a serious book, made for grownups, and it expects you to be able to extrapolate from examples and make use of the references you've been given. To my mind that is the only way to really learn this stuff.”

Victor Kane, author of Leveraging Drupal: Getting Your Site Done Right (Wrox, Feb. 2009), has also reviewed the book on Amazon:

I can't say enough good things about this book. It reflects the knowledge and long-time experience of two hard-working and generous professionals. If you are only going to buy two or three Drupal books, make sure this one is always handy while you are working.

About the Authors

Some of you may have seen Emma Jane and Konstantin speak at DrupalCon ‘09 in March: Emma Jane, on The Themer’s Toolkit (Chapters 2 and 3 of Front End Drupal); and Konstantin, on JavaScript and JQuery (Chapters 9-11 of the book).

Emma Jane has been working as a Web developer since 1996. She is well known in the Drupal community not only for her technical knowledge, but also for her engaging and humorous means of bringing Drupal to a wider audience–such as the Drupal socks and their GPLed pattern. She is known as “emmajane” on drupal.org and chronicles her adventures at www.emmajane.net.

Konstantin is currently user interface engineer at NowPublic, a large citizen journalism site built with Drupal, and is currently studying IT Systems Engineering at Hasso Platter Institute, Potsdam. As a participant in Google’s Summer of Code 2006 project, he focused on improving Drupal’s administrative front end. He is known as kkaefer on drupal.org and blogs at www.kkaefer.com.