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Drupal 7
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Excellent! I'll run right out and install and use it...just as soon as you actually tell us what the heck it is! Your article isn't very helpful if you don't already know what you're talking about.
It is a new kind of sword based on black silicon.
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?
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
This seems an awful lot like an advert to me. Should it really be on the front page?
Remember when most of the web was static pages, and they didn't suck?
Can Drupal 7 get us back to that?
What the heck is Drupal? Are we meant to know? I've never even heard of it?
It's a masculinity enhancement accessory.
The last major release (6.0) was in February 2008. The Drupal 7 core has been rewritten heavily along with the UI, particularly in the area of the database interface and content storage. I wouldn't be surprised if the final 7.0 release will be almost three full years after 6.0, but as far as I can tell the wait will have been worth it.
You should be able to tell by looking at the sample cover. It's about growing flowers.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Drupal Drupal ... Drupal. wft is Drupal?
Sounds like you're singing The Drupal Song, which conveniently explains what Drupal is while infecting your brain. (Unplugged).
Or you could try Wikipedia.
W
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Let me Google that for you.
Seriously, though, Drupal is one of the more popular web content management systems out there. You can think of it in the same space as Wordpress, Joomla, Plone, Alfresco (sort of), and so on. The idea behind these systems is to build web sites and manage web site content without having to hard-code everything. Each system does it differently with different focuses on specific parts of the web site content creation process. Wordpress, for example, is a moderately simple system that's popular for blog creation - though it has some extensibility, ease-of-use has always been its primary goal. Drupal, meanwhile, is sort of the "Linux" of the web site creation world, in that you can customize it via specialized modules to make it do whatever you want, but it doesn't do you a whole lot of favors right out of the gate. Joomla is probably closer to Drupal than Wordpress, Alfresco's primary goal is document management (automating workflows, permissions, etc.) so it treats web content accordingly, and I don't know enough about Plone to talk about it even remotely intelligently.
So there you go.
If I wanted to Google it, I wouldn't read the fucking summary.
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.
Luckily for you, I explained what Drupal was in the second paragraph of my comment.
The summary manages to cram the word 'Drupal' in seven times in it's nine sentences. So yes, it is heavy on the word 'Drupal".
The summary also tells you what Drupal is:
"It helps spread the word to everyone about this flexible and robust content management system."
The summary isn't about Drupal, it's about a book.
Dilbert RSS feed
Wow, this is like the 4th Drupal book review on Slashdot in less than a year. I've never tinkered with it, but I've yet to talk to anyone who has had any problem getting it up and running, let alone needed a book. How about a few book reviews on something we aren't familiar with?
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
So basically, it's a fuming great big pile of shit?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I read the summary, and all I see is someone looking for excuses to talk about Drupal. Please, talk a bit more about the beta! I'll read the article, don't worry, but please give me something tangible.
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
Yup, the biggest of them all.
Yes, in much the same way that Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows are fuming great big piles of shit compared to a set of skilled engineers hard-coding in machine code against a motherboard.
They're generalized solutions to complex problems. Like all generalized solutions, they're more bloated than a more specialized solution for a specific problem because they contain code that solves problems you don't necessarily need solved. On the other hand, they usually take less time to deploy and they might solve a few problems that you don't even know you have.
Other than that, my main objection to this review is that it lacks sufficient keywords so that anyone could figure out what it does.
Keywords are your friends.
Proselytizing won't work if you don't say what it does.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Seriously, acting all mysteriously won't help us.
Is it stuff like record locking issues, mishandling of input strings so that it's so hackable a Chinese baby could hack it, or is it stuff nobody cares about like field locking or only being able to run on machines that have less than 64 cores on an 8 blade server and not addressing more than 2000 terabytes of memory space.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Flamebait perhaps, but still correct!
>>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!
I'm planning a new Drupal installation, and will be using Drupal 6. Even if 7 was released today, I'd still go with 6. The fact is that as a Framework, Drupal's strength is in its contributed modules. While many of the most popular contributed modules pledge to have a Drupal 7 version on release day, I expect that roughly half of the modules I want will not have a Drupal 7 release for up to a year. Not to mention the inevitable headaches from version *.0 of any software. So while it's nice to think about how awesome and shiny Drupal 7 is, it's just not realistic to be considering it for real websites at this time.
Now, if I was just setting up a blog about my cat, there's probably plenty of functionality for that out of the box. But then, wouldn't it be easier to use a more targeted system for that, like Wordpress?
Grumble...and I thought /. knew something I didn't about the actual release, not some stupid book. Who reads software books anymore anyway?
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
Wow, this is like the 4th Drupal book review on Slashdot in less than a year. I've never tinkered with it, but I've yet to talk to anyone who has had any problem getting it up and running, let alone needed a book. How about a few book reviews on something we aren't familiar with?
The learning curve for Drupal was more than I could be bothered with. I ended up going with Wordpress and had my site up and running within half an hour.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
And I'd like to take this opportunity to advertise - Drupalcon Chicago will be in March 2011. And if you are in Europe, I have it on reasonably good authority that you can look forward to the announcement of the location of the Autumn conference either later this week or next week. And this week we moved the Drupal.org site redesign live.
I really wanted this book since I'm a Druapl user and want to find out about the upcoming changes / features in Drupal 7. I found out that the Packt Publishing website has a special going... and I was able to pick up the electronic release for $9.99. I bought myself a copy. They let you download a PDF that has your name and address embedded in the footer of each page. I like to have printed copies so I fired it off to the laser printer. Great value. Of course you can order the print version, or the print / ebook combo from them too if desired.
Scott Dowdle
www.MontanaLinux.Org
nail on head. I tried to help[ a site that was getting thousands of hits a day but had built their entire siter on Drupal with it's homemade version of ORM. They needed lots of many-to-many tables and everytime you do that in a NORMAL RDBMS, you only need two tables and one joining table. But in Drupal's infinite Wisdom, it creates 5 tables to do the same thing and similar situations with one to many. Over time your database becomes a nightmarish solution to manage and is sluggish and slow due to a poorly automated solution rather than a DBA having creating a structured relational DB.
Hell even Hibernate is a million times better than that mess. Makes you wants to cram a espresso steamer up a Drupal developers nose and foam whats left of their brains. Yes I need my coffee and yes I'm from Seattle.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Right, 'cause it's creating the overhead it needs to convert those tables into objects that Drupal understands (nodes) and mapping the relationships between those objects using methods that Drupal understands (taxonomies and such).
Right tool for the right job and all that.
I tried to set up svg display in drupal6 but couldn't do it. The only software I can find to accept svg is Mediawiki.
And while the odds are it will be released sometime soon, it's going to be too late. They cry for help over there. They scream when you point out a bug. So I tried to help. I posted a few patches, on active issues. I opened new issues and posted patches. Ignored. Totally.
And the bike shedding? Holy crap.
And look out if webchick makes a decision that affects 1000s but scratches her itch! I don't know how sun and chx do it, commit to core that is.
Prediction: Drupal 7 will launch sometime soon, but it will still have broken code from the 4.6 series, and they'll just blame those pointing it out.
I can't speak to daily maintenance but I can tell you that it's easier to get up and start producing actual content on a site that looks like what you want with Drupal than with any of those. Drupal has had some huge wins lately in taking over sites, like The Economist.
The maintenance is pretty easy too except that upgrades are insufficiently automated.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The learning curve for Drupal was more than I could be bothered with. I ended up going with Wordpress and had my site up and running within half an hour.
That's funny, I couldn't get Wordpress to install by following the instructions, and had Drupal up and running within half an hour. I've been running it for years now. Useless anecdotes FTW!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well, let's hope they are better at keeping up with PHP versions with 7 than they were with 6. Using Drupal 6 with PHP 5.3.2 was worse than any beta I have ever participated in. Core features failed, plugins would not run, things just did not work. Still it was the most promising environment we have encountered for integrating Lucene, Solr, and Alchemy for an advanced NLP research workstation. If 7 is well behaved enough then we may even attempt a GATE integration.