Using Drupal

Foreword

Dries Buytaert

Drupal founder and project lead

Drupal’s modular architecture and open source nature make it a popular PHP application framework and content management system for hundreds of thousands of web developers around the world. More than 900 people contributed code and ideas to the Drupal 6 release and even more are responsible for developing and maintaining more than 2,000 contributed modules that can be used to extend Drupal’s functionality.

The size, passion, and velocity of the Drupal community, combined with Drupal’s strength as a platform, allow incredible things to happen. Every day new modules are contributed and existing modules are improved upon. Whether these modules are created to catch up with the latest trends on the Web or to invent completely new paradigms, the Drupal project continues to expand in many different directions.

The beauty of all these modules is that they empower website builders to assemble rich and powerful websites quickly and easily without having to be a programmer. Millions of people are using Drupal to build personal blogs, corporate websites, intranets, online photo galleries, wikis, job posting boards, conference websites, and more.

Unfortunately, the challenge for many of these site administrators, and even seasoned Drupal developers, is to try and make sense of all these modules and the ever-expanding Drupal universe. What modules should you use to build a newspaper website? What modules should you use to build an intranet? What modules are best avoided because they are being deprecated by better ones? What modules can be used on really big websites that serve millions of pages a day? Navigating your way through the Drupal world can be daunting.

This book cuts out a lot of the research time and helps you dive headfirst into Drupal. It does an excellent job 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. I promise that by the end of this book, you’ll be much more prepared to build the Drupal site of your dreams.