“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.
Table of Contents:
Foreword xvii
Preface xix
Acknowledgments xxiii
About the Authors xxv
Chapter 1: Web Page Design 1
Describing Content 2
Organizing Lists of Content 8
Page Design and Layout 14
Interaction 20
Code 22
Work Flow 25
Summary 29
Chapter 2: The Themers’ Toolkit 31
A Gentle Introduction 32
Theming Strategies 33
Drupal Terminology 36
Must-Have Modules 42
Browser Tools 60
Language References 65
Maintaining Your System 69
Summary 71
Chapter 3: Working with Drupal Themes 73
Finding Themes 74
Installing Drupal Themes 78
Administering Themes 82
Anatomy of a Theme 88
Starter Themes 94
Migrating to Drupal 6 99
Summary 104
Chapter 4: The Drupal Page 107
Elements of a Page 107
Sitewide Page Variables 109
Navigation and Menus 115
Grid Work 120
Search 126
Changing Templates 128
Alias: Page 133
Taxonomy Templates 138
Delivering Plain Content 141
Summary 149
Chapter 5: Drupal Content 151
Node Templates 151
Gaining More Control Than $content Provides 155
Node Template Variables 161
Pages and Teasers 165
Images 169
Making Lists of Content with Views 177
Summary 181
Chapter 6: Customizing the Content-Editing Forms 183
Web Forms 184
Form Candy 185
Rich Text Editing 195
Altering Forms with FAPI 201
Multiple-Page Forms 210
Improving Access to Edit Screens 212
Summary 217
Chapter 7: Users and Community Participation 219
Users 219
Granting and Restricting Access 227
Community Comments 231
User-Generated Content 235
Spam 240
Private Web Site Areas 244
Summary 248
Chapter 8: Administrative Interfaces 251
Creating a Custom Administrative Interface 252
Task-Based Navigation 256
Administrative Menus 261
Administrative Dashboards and Control Panels 266
Custom Administrative Screens 270
Error! 279
Summary 283
Chapter 9: Learning JavaScript 285
JavaScript versus DOM 286
The JavaScript Language 287
Object Orientation in JavaScript 293
Summary 309
Chapter 10: An Introduction to jQuery 311
A First Look at jQuery 313
Using jQuery 320
Leveraging jQuery’s Full Potential 333
Using Other JavaScript Libraries 343
Summary 344
Chapter 11: JavaScript in Drupal 345
Server-Side Drupal Integration 345
Architecting a Component 353
Example: Horizontal Scroller 355
Using Plugins and jQuery UI 377
Summary 380
Appendix A: Installing Drupal 381
Setting Up a Development Server 381
Configuring Document Root and Virtual Hosts 383
Installing Drupal–and Common Hurdles to Its Installation 385
A Quick Glance at the Admin Area 388
Installing Modules 389
Appendix B: Supplemental Code 391
template 391
demo-module 397
template-skeleton 400
horizscroll and horizscroll-datasource 404
sparkline 415
Index 419
About the Author :
Emma Jane Hogbin has been working as a Web developer since 1996, helping individuals and organizations to realize both their own potential and the potential of their online presence. She creates systems that enable her clients to succeed–by using her infectious enthusiasm and ability to explain concepts without using technical jargon that puts even the greatest technophobes at ease. Passionate about helping people to acquire knowledge, Emma volunteers with the Drupal and Ubuntu documentation teams. 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. Through her consulting company HICK Tech, and at conferences around the world, Emma has inspired people to overcome fear, uncertainty, and doubt and to tackle problems head-on. She is known as “emmajane” on drupal.org and chronicles her adventures at http://www.emmajane.net.
Konstantin Käfer started his adventures into Web development in 1999. In high school, he led the Web development and school Web site class for several years. While still in high school, he also participated in Google’s Summer of Code 2006, doing usability enhancements for the Drupal project. In the Drupal community, he is widely known for his JavaScript skills. Konstantin has been a speaker at several DrupalCons and other Open Source conferences. He is currently studying IT Systems at the Hasso Plattner Institute Engineering in Potsdam, Germany. He also works as a consultant for NowPublic, a large citizen journalism Web site based on Drupal. He can be found blogging on http://kkaefer.com about design, Web development, and Drupal.
