Using Drupal cuts out a lot of the research time and helps you dive headfirst into Drupal. It does an excellent job of explaining how to rapidly assemble a wide variety of websites using some of Drupal's most commonly used modules. Whether you're new to building websites or an experienced programmer, this book is full of useful information. By the end of Using Drupal, you'll be much more prepared to build the Drupal site you've always wanted.

Is That Site Running Drupal?
By Angela Byron

Various attempts at "fingerprinting" a Drupal site have been tried in the past, none of which are completely foolproof. These range from *super* easy stuff like checking for CHANGELOG.txt to checking the source for a reference to "drupal.css" (Drupal 4.7) to checking for common paths like taxonomy/term/1, and /user, (which might be aliased to something else with something like Pathauto/Path Redirect module), and so on. However, since Drupal 4.6, there's a super geeky trick you can use to fingerprint a Drupal site that works 90% of the time. 1. Get Firefox. 2. Get the Live HTTP Headers extension. 3. After restarting Firefox, click Tools > Live HTTP Headers. This'll pop up a little window to the side. 4. Visit a website you suspect of being Drupalish. 5. Highlight the Live HTTP headers window and type "exp", looking for the following in the output: "Expires: Sun, 19 Nov 1978 05:00:00 GMT"

"Classic" Web Problems, Solved
Drupal version: 6.x
By Jeff Eaton

A lot of energy in the Drupal world goes towards solving complex problems: giving administrators ways to build publishing workflows without writing code, integrating with cool new APIs, automatically translating site content into Klingon... You know. The usual. With all of that energy focused on complex architectural problems, it's easy to lose sight of the simple solutions that Drupal provides for really common "classic" web problems. This really hit home the other week as I sifted through an old Zip disk with archives of sites I'd built for clients in the heady days of the late 90s. One by one, I started ticking off requests my clients had made that today's site-builders can solve in minutes with Drupal modules--no wacky configuration, no complicated recipes. Just a simple, "Yes!" when a client says, "Can you...?" "...Make a splash page for the site?" No problem. Drop in the Splash module, and you can use any page on your site as an interstitial splash page. It's also smart enough to tie into contextual information Drupal provides--only showing the splash screen to anonymous users, creating section-specific splash pages, and more. "...Let visitors print out copies of the pages?" While any web browser can print a simple copy of the current page, and custom style sheets can help clean up color schemes and images to make a page look printer-friendly, sometimes, things need tweaking. For example, embedded web links will look like simple underlined text if you rely on style sheet tweaks. Drupal's Print module generates printer-friendly versions of any page, including the creation of URL footnotes at the bottom of each printout. It can also generate downloadable PDFs of any page, and send-this-article-to-a-friend email links. "...Show visitors a Terms Of Service page before they sign up to post on the site?" Letting users sign up to post comments, subscribe to newsletters, and so on was just catching on when I handcrafted those old-school sites in the '90s. The Terms of Use module handles one of the tricky parts: requiring users to explicitly agree to terms of service before they can create an account. It lets you maintain your terms as a dedicated page on the site that users can read, and present it to them with an 'Approval' checkbox when they create an account. "...Add a chat page where users can talk in real-time?" Setting up chat rooms on web pages was always a pain in the old days. Even today it can be tricky, and there are quite a few different ways to do it. Flash, AJAX, Java applets, and more are all ready. The Mibbit module for Drupal lets site visitors chat on a custom IRC channel using a simple AJAX interface. Since it uses IRC as its backend, it can point to custom private discussion channels, or public ones like #drupal on the freenode IRC network. "...Keep other sites from stealing my content using Frames?" This one went out of style for a while, but when Google's AdSense and other advertising networks up momentum, some enterprising individuals resurrected the concept of "wrapping" other sites in HTML frames, presenting ads in the sidebars while leeching the original site's bandwidth and content. JavaScript can help: script snippets can force your page to open in a dedicated window instead of a frame, and the FramePrevention module makes that trick automatic. None of these modules are crazy, groundbreaking tools that get their own articles and tutorial videos. Like many of the tools in the Drupal world, though, they do the heavy lifting that lets us focus on the really complicated tasks. Looking back, it's hard not to sigh and wonder how much time could've been saved if I'd had them at my disposal in The Olden Days...

Widely praised for its inÐdepth coverage of Drupal internals, bestselling Pro Drupal Development has been completely updated for Drupal 6.

Learn to set up, manage, and administer a Drupal Web site

Drupal offers unparalleled flexibility for content-managed Web sites, but most Drupal books are written for expert developers. Drupal For Dummies shows you the fast, fun and easy way to get going with Drupal, set up a site, apply templates, use modules, and more, even if you have no programming experience.

Drupal For Dummies shows you how to take advantage of everything in Drupal that is ready to use, demystifying what may appear to be a complex set of tools.

• Drupal is a free, open source modular framework and content management system designed for content-managed Web sites
• Learn how to download Drupal, install the LAMP stack, and set up a site; no programming experience required
• Organize and create your site's content; apply templates, and get your first site up and running
• Use modules and third-party templates
• Follow plain-English instructions for site management, including making changes across the site and managing user access and privileges

Drupal For Dummies is designed to help the non-programmer who simply wants to turbocharge a blog or is responsible for administering a content-managed site.

“For Drupal to succeed, we need books like this.”

–Dries Buytaert, Drupal founder and project lead

“Drupal faces a common problem on the Web–the relative lack of new, high quality themes. Front End Drupal tackles this problem directly and is designed to help both experienced designers and rank novices get an understanding of how Drupal theming works. In fact, I’ll be the first to admit I learned a lot from this book.”

– Dries Buytaert, Drupal founder and project lead

The Practical, Complete Guide to Customizing Drupal Sites with Behaviors, Themes, and Templates

Drupal is now the world’s #1 open source content management system: Thousands of individuals and organizations are using it to build and update Web sites of virtually every kind. As Web designers and developers adopt Drupal, they need ways to quickly customize the visuals and interactivity of their sites. Drupal offers powerful tools for doing so, but little guidance on using them effectively. Front End Drupal is the solution. In this book, two expert Drupal developers cover everything you need to know to create great visual designs and state-of-the-art interactivity with Drupal’s behaviors, themes, and templates.

Front End Drupal is 100% focused on issues of site design, behavior, usability, and management. The authors show how to style Drupal sites, make the most of Drupal’s powerful templating system, build sophisticated community sites, streamline site management, and build more portable, flexible themes. You’ll also gain hands-on experience through several case studies that walk you through the customization of everything from page templates to Web site forums.

• Prepare and organize content so it’s easier to integrate into Drupal Web sites
• Structure Drupal page templates that are easy to work with
• Configure Drupal with the modules and browser tools you need to customize your site
• Utilize Drupal’s Starter Themes and themes converted from WordPress, Joomla!™, and Drupal 5.x
• Maximize the power and usability of Drupal’s content editing forms
• Build usable community sites with user profiles, comments, and user-generated content
• Use JavaScript™ to make your themes interactive and to enhance usability
• Create powerful animations and AJAX callbacks with jQuery, Drupal’s JavaScript library

About the Web Site

The accompanying site, frontenddrupal.com, contains all sample code and themes presented in this book.

This book focuses on the nontechnical user who is responsible for building, maintaining, and managing Drupal web sites. The book covers why you should consider using Drupal when building a new web site, what Drupal is, installing and configuring Drupal, creating and managing content, managing users, adding functionality to your web site through Drupal modules, and more advanced topics on using themes, panels, and views. By reading this book, you will:

• Understand why you should use Drupal and the power of the platform.
• Quickly build confidence in your ability to use Drupal.
• Gain the knowledge necessary to build, deploy, and manage web sites of moderate complexity on Drupal 7.

What you’ll learn

• What Drupal is and why you should use it
• How to install a basic Drupal web site from scratch
• How to create content in your new Drupal web site
• How to manage users on your new Drupal web site
• How to change the look and feel of your new Drupal web site through themes
• How to install and configure modules

Who this book is for

This book is for nontechnical users who need to use Drupal to manage content, as well as PHP developers who are new to Drupal.

Maintain, add to, and edit content of your Drupal site with ease

• Keep your Drupal site up to date: easily edit, add to, and maintain your site's content, even if you've never used Drupal before!
• Covers the full range of content that you might want on your site: richly formatted text, images, videos, as well as blog posts, calendar events, and more
• Get to grips with managing users, slaying spam, and other activities that will help you maintain a content-rich site
• Concise, targeted information with easy-to-follow hands-on examples

In Detail Often a company hires a web designer to build its Drupal site, and then takes over running the site in house. This book is for the Content Editors concerned with the ongoing creation and maintenance of the site content.

In a few hours, you'll have the knowledge needed to maintain and edit your web site as a content-rich place that visitors return to again and again. There are many books available to help you administer a Drupal site, but this is the only one specifically for Content Editors. This book doesn't cover designing or creating a site. However, anybody who has built their own site but needs some help using the article management features will also benefit from it.

This book is a quick-start guide, aimed at Content Editors. The author's experience enables him to explain in an efficient and interactive manner how you can keep your site up to date. The book begins with a discussion of content management and Drupal and then teaches you how to create content, add elements to it, and make the content findable. You will then learn to set up the framework for a creative team and the various options for editing content offline, their benefits and pitfalls.

This book helps you to quickly and easily solve problems, and manage content and users for a web site. It will help you become a more effective and efficient manager of Drupal-based web sites.

What you will learn from this book?

• Learn the various methods of inputting text , the various content creation and editing capabilities that are available to users
• Add elements to your content to spice it up: teasers, links, images, embedded sound, embedded video, PDFs
• Make changes to the article you created, use a PHP snippet to provide content, edit a revised article
• Apply basic Search Engine Optimization by creating a URL and category tags to complement the content
• Create a text block in order to make content available in multiple locations, create a video block to use in the site margin, create a blog entry
• Set up the framework for a creative editorial team having editors with different roles and privileges, working together to keep the site up to date
• Use options for creating and editing content offline and via email and apply each of the methods you learned to send content to the project site

Approach

This is a fun, informative, hands-on learning guide that uses an actual case study. In an interactive and informal manner, this guide presents purposeful examples that continue to build on each other. Clear, concise instructions and practical examples mean you can learn quickly how to take care of the content in your Drupal site.

Who this book is written for?

This book is designed for those who run the site day-to-day but didn't set it up, and aren't necessarily that well versed in Drupal or web technologies.

You could be a content editor, proofreader, graphic artist, feature editor, or anyone else concerned with managing content on a Drupal installation.

The first book to reveal the vulnerabilities and security issues that exist in the sites that have been built with Drupal?and how to prevent them from continuing Drupal is an open source framework and content management system that allows users to create and organize content, customize presentation, automate tasks, and manage site visitors and contributors. Authored by a Drupal expert, this is the first book to reveal the vulnerabilities and security issues that exist in the sites that have been built with Drupal?and how to prevent them from continuing. The main goal of this guide is to explain how to write code that avoids an attack in the Drupal environment, while also addressing how to proceed if vulnerability has been spotted and then regain control of security.

In Detail

Drupal is a hugely popular and widely celebrated open-source Content Management System that is day-by-day becoming the first choice of people for building blogs and other websites. Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the father of the Internet), Hillary Clinton, and many others utilize Drupal to fulfil their online requirements.

Drupal is an elegantly designed, well-supported and flexible platform that anyone can use in order to create their own website. With such a powerful tool at your fingertips there is no longer any need to pay professionals to design a site when you can do the same job yourself absolutely free. All it takes is a bit of practice!

This book meets the booming demand for well presented, clear, concise, and above all practical information on how to move from knowing you want a website all the way through to designing and building it like a pro, and finally successfully managing and maintaining it.

Experienced technical author David Mercer expertly guides the reader through all the stages of building a professional website in a plain, articulate manner. Aimed in particular at beginners to Drupal, this book will allow readers to advance rapidly up the learning curve to the point where they can tackle any problem with confidence.

What you will learn from this book?

• Plan and consider various design aspects of your site
• Install, set up, and configure a Drupal development machine
• Find your way around the vast array of Drupal settings with ease
• Add and work with modules to enhance your website's functionality
• Control and manage your site's content
• Deal with security issues, users, and access control
• Implement a customized interface for your website
• Add powerful new features and learn advanced techniques
• Deploy, manage, and maintain your website

Approach

Written in the same style as the original Drupal title, this book is a pragmatic look at the steps necessary to get a website up and running. Drawing on years of writing experience, David Mercer utilizes a friendly, engaging style that is both clear and concise - perfect for the Drupal newbie.

Who this book is written for?

This book is for people with little or no experience in website design, people who are not familiar with PHP, MySQL or HTML, and above all people with little to no experience in using Drupal. Even intermediate Drupal users will find this book of interest although it is specifically aimed at pushing beginners up the learning curve.

This book is geared toward professionals that need to deploy and customize Drupal. This book delves deep into the internals of the Drupal 7 system and teaches you everything you need to know to deploy a highly customized and optimized Drupal installation. Every web developer looking to deploy web sites quickly to their clients while still being able to harness the power of an excellent content management system needs this book.

What you’ll learn

• What Drupal is and why you should use it
• How to install a basic Drupal web site from scratch
• How to create content in your new Drupal web site
• How to manage users on your new Drupal web site
• How to change the look and feel of your new Drupal web site through themes
• How to install and configure modules

Who this book is for

This book is for existing Drupal module developers wanting to learn about Drupal 7 and people already knowledgeable in PHP who are interested in developing for Drupal. Simply put, if you are working with Drupal, then you need this book.

In Detail

With great power comes... tremendous flexibility. Drupal is an award-winning open-source Content Management System, and the feature-packed sixth release is right around the corner. It's a modular system, with an elegant hook-based architecture, and great code. These are a few of the perks that make Drupal a choice platform for developers who want the power of an established CMS, but the freedom to make it work for them. From social networking to AJAX to e-commerce, the hundreds of existing modules attest to Drupal's flexibility. When you create a new module for Drupal, it fits seamlessly into the look and feel of your overall site. If you can think it in PHP, you can code it as a Drupal module.

Dive into Drupal module development as we create the Philosopher Biographies website, developing new modules and themes to meet practical goals. Create custom content types. Add AJAX functionality with the jQuery library. Use external XML APIs to add content to your site. Email newsletters to site members. Use themes. Empower administrators with extra features. And bundle it all up in a custom installation profile. You won't find a "hello world" here!

If you're eager to start creating modules for Drupal 6, this is your book. Walk through the development of complete Drupal modules with this primer for PHP programmers. Specifically written for Drupal 6, this book will get you coding modules as quickly as possible, and help you add the features that will give your work that professional gloss!

Just getting started with Drupal development? This book will give you a clear, concise and, of course, practical guidance to take you from the basics of creating your first module to developing the skills to make you a Drupal developer to be reckoned with.

Are you a Drupal developer looking to update to version 6? This book covers the new and updated APIs to guide your transition to Drupal 6. The new menu system, the Forms and Schema APIs, and many core revisions are covered in this book.

What you will learn from this book?

• A developer's overview of important Drupal concepts and APIs, like nodes, menus, and forms
• Using Drupal tools for module development
• Creating a new module from scratch
• Harnessing the power of the Drupal hook system
• Using key Drupal functions
• Creating custom content types, from basic to advanced
• Performing database operations
• Writing module installers and uninstallers
• Making Drupal content available to JavaScript with a JSON service
• Interacting with the theme system to build crisp layouts
• Creating richer user interfaces with Drupal's JavaScript libraries
• Working with blocks, nodes, actions, and menus
• Using a web service to retrieve and display XML data
• Creating an administration interface
• Customizing user profiles
• Writing actions and triggering them with events
• Working with the Forms API
• Defining custom hooks and making modules work together
• Exploring the database and schema API
• Creating an installation profile to bundle your modules into a custom Drupal distribution

Who this book is written for?

This book is written for PHP developers who want to add custom features to Drupal. You will need to know the basics of PHP and MySQL programming, but no experience of programming Drupal is required, although you will be expected to be familiar with the basic operation of Drupal.