Site builders

The Intermediate level complements the beginner level. It is aimed at people who already had previous contact with Drupal and want to understand it in depth and make better use of its full potential. Completing this level is very useful for building professional Websites with features that go far beyond company webs or personal blogs. Programming knowledge is not required to study intermediate level.

Contents:

• 21. Creating forms with Webform
• 22. Advanced content types
• 23. Views
• 24. Automatic image processing
• 25. Extending menus with additional modules
• 26. Extending blocks with additional modules
• 27. Panels
• 28. Display Suite
• 29. Customizing Themes
• 30. Actions and Triggers
• 31. Rules
• 32. Defining contexts
• 33. Extending users
• 34. Workflow
• 35. Multilingual sites
• 36. E-commerce: Introduction to Ubercart and Drupal Commerce
• 37. SEO Positioning with Drupal
• 38. Social tools: voting and sharing content
• 39. Newsletter Subscription
• 40. Other Features

Beginner level is aimed at those people with or without technical training, who want to start creating Websites. It is also very useful for companies or professionals who wish to create their professional or personal Website without depending on external assistance. At this level, the aim is for the student to acquire sound basic knowledge in order to tackle the following educational levels with guarantees.

Contents:

• 1. Introduction to Drupal
• 2. Drupal installation
• 3. Administration area
• 4. Content management
• 5. Content types
• 6. Menu management
• 7. Blocks management
• 8. Themes
• 9. Extending functionality with modules
• 10. Management of users, roles and permissions
• 11. Taxonomy
• 12. Text formats and WYSIWYG editors
• 13. Blogs
• 14. Forums
• 15. Structured documents: Books
• 16. Media Galleries
• 17. Searches
• 18. Languages and translation
• 19. Access statistics
• 20. Website management, maintenance and updating
• Annex A. Configuration of the hosting and necessary tools
• Annex B. Links and resources of interest

How can you help your Drupal website continue to perform at the highest level as it grows to meet demand? This comprehensive guide provides best practices, examples, and in-depth explanations for solving several performance and scalability issues. You’ll learn how to apply coding and infrastructure techniques to Drupal internals, application performance, databases, web servers, and performance analysis.

Covering Drupal versions 7 and 8, this book is the ideal reference for everything from site deployment to implementing specific technologies such as Varnish, memcache, or Solr. If you have a basic understanding of Drupal and the Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) stack, you’re ready to get started.

• Establish a performance baseline and define goals for improvement
• Optimize your website’s code and front-end performance
• Get best and worst practices for customizing Drupal core functionality
• Apply infrastructure design techniques to launch or expand a site
• Use tools to configure, monitor, and optimize MySQL performance
• Employ alternative storage and backend search options as your site grows
• Tune your web servers through httpd and PHP configuration
• Monitor services and perform load tests to catch problems before they become critical

From the publisher's description:

In Pro Drupal as an Enterprise Development Platform authors Jamie Kurtz and Thomas Besluau explain how developers can save themselves time and money, and build their applications faster with fewer bugs by using the Drupal CMS as a foundation for their projects. The days when custom client applications were built entirely from scratch are over. Today, it makes business sense to use a flexible, highly scalable framework such as Drupal, Joomla or DotNetNuke as a foundation. This book focuses on why Drupal makes a particularly strong choice for the majority of developers.

With an unprecedented level of community support, tens of thousands of well-proven plug-ins and modules available for download, and advanced content management rules and configuration engines Drupal is flexible enough to provide a firm base upon which almost all enterprise application developers can build their own custom solutions.

As this book will make clear, it is no longer necessary for developers to write complex applications entirely from scratch for each of their clients. Instead,they should begin by using an enterprise-class CMS like Drupal to provide a robust foundation for them so that they can concentrate their time and skills into solving the business-specific problems of each individual client maximizing the value that they add to each assignment.

Start reading Drupal as an Enterprise Development Platform today to get your development team out of the trenches and back on track to delivering real-world business value.

What you’ll learn

• Achieve a thorough understanding of how Drupal supports enterprise-grade application development. Find the answers to most common development, testing, deployment and maintance questions relating to large-scale deployment.
• Read a comprehensive walk-through of the common business continuity, regulatory and security concerns that come with using Drupal as a development platform and how to address them effectively.
• Walk-through real world examples of integrating Drupal into new or existing service-oriented architectures (SOA).
• Be inspired as to the many and varied application build types that Drupal is easily able to support.
• Get a head-start on your competition!

Who this book is for

This book is targeted at enterprise software developers, architects, and managers looking to increase productivity and reduce time to market on new services, applications, features, and bug fixes. Knowledge of PHP is not required.

What you will learn from this book

• Set up a custom WYSIWYG profile and text format
• Learn to manage and embed images in content, and create image galleries and albums
• Manage and embed videos and audio playlists
• Set up HTML5-based video and audio players and integrate with JavaScript libraries for native browser support
• Enhance images with visual effects, and media content with multiple upload widgets, social ratings, watermark effects, and other community-contributed modules
• Create an HTML5-based canvas drawing application
• Build a responsive web design layout and semantic website with HTML5 and modern themes

In Detail

Integrating images, video, and audio content on a Drupal site requires knowledge of appropriate community modules, and an understanding of how to configure and connect them properly. With the power of up-to-date technologies such as HTML5, responsive web design, and the best modules available in Drupal's eco-system, we can create the best Drupal 7 media website.

Drupal 7 Media is a practical, hands-on guide that will introduce you to the basic structure of a Drupal site and guide you through the integration of images, videos, and audio content. Learn to leverage the most suitable community modules and up-to-date technology such as HTML5 to offer a great user experience through rich media content.

The book begins with a practical introduction to the basic Drupal building blocks. It then breaks down each media resource, and explores them in detail.

You will learn how to leverage Drupal’s community modules to implement support for images, videos, and audio content, along with the best practices for implementation. We will be mentioning ideas throughout the book, which you can extend upon and use to build your own web applications. We will explore HTML5 support for media resources, the semantic web, and responsive web design, which are key topics in modern web application development. We will then build upon this knowledge and add more functionality to our sample website, such as support for analytic charts and customizing images, all of which we will implement using our own custom modules.

You will learn everything you need to know about building, extending, and configuring a Drupal 7 media web application.

Approach

This is a practical, hands-on guide packed with examples that will help you build rich Drupal 7 media web applications.

Who this book is for

If you are a Drupal site builder and you wish to spice up your web applications with rich media content, then this book is for you. A basic understanding of HTML, JavaScript, and basic PHP module development in Drupal would be helpful, but is not necessary.

What you will learn from this book

• Start selling on the web with Drupal Commerce
• Improve your store’s search engine friendliness
• Customise the look and feel of your store
• Streamline the way you manage your store with hints and tips for everyday management
• Calculate the correct tax on your orders
• Manage customer profiles to make both your life and your customers’ lives easier
• Create custom product types to allow files uploads, colour and size variations, and more
• Includes end-to-end T-shirt shop tutorial and blueprint

In Detail

Get to grips with Drupal Commerce, the new ecommerce framework based on the Drupal CMS , one of the most popular and powerful open source content management systems available.

"Building E-commerce Sites with Drupal Commerce Cookbook" takes you through the installation, configuration, and customisation of your Drupal Commerce store. With clear, practical recipes with plenty of screenshots and tips this book will help you build attractive and profitable eCommerce sites.

This book starts by showing you how to install and configure your Drupal Commerce store. Once your shop is up and running, you’ll then learn how to customise and optimise it to make it stand out and display your products better.

Going further into customisation, you will learn to add custom product types before creating a stylish new Drupal theme for your store. Packed with tips, this book will also help guide you through common problems, as well as optimising and managing your store on a day to day basis.

"Building E-commerce Sites with Drupal Commerce Cookbook" will guide you through everything you need to know to get your online store up and running and selling your products, with easy step-by-step guides and screenshots to help walk you through everything.

Approach

"Building E-commerce Sites with Drupal Commerce Cookbook" is written in a helpful, practical style with numerous hands-on recipes to help you build attractive eCommerce sites.

Who this book is for

This book is primarily for store owners and web designers with little or no experience of Drupal and Drupal Commerce who want to build and customise a store in Drupal Commerce. You will have a basic knowledge of websites, but you don’t need to be familiar with Drupal or PHP. However, this book would also suit experienced Drupal and Ubercart users who want to migrate to or build a Drupal Commerce store.