Drupal's Building Blocks: Quickly Building Websites with CCK, Views and Panels

Description

Even if you're already a seasoned Drupal user of CCK, Views, or Panels, I've no doubt that this book will provide you with several new techniques and methods for getting the most out of these extremely essential modules. It certainly has for me.

 - Dries Buytaert, founder and project lead of Drupal, and CTO of Acquia

With Drupal, Web professionals can create full-featured Web sites with just a few clicks. Drupal's core is compact and well documented, but much of Drupal's immense power lies elsewhere - in external modules. Drupal's Building Blocks is an authoritative tutorial, reference, and cookbook for Drupal's most valuable modules.

The authors are Drupal insiders who've spent years creating and supporting these modules - Earl Miles, developer of the Views and Panels modules, and Lynette Miles, Drupal documentation team member. They've brought together indispensable information you won't find anywhere else, as well as extensive sample recipe code designed for easy adaptation and reuse. Learn how to

* Use Content Construction Kit (CCK) to customize your data input forms around your needs
* Improve site flexibility with Drupal's node system
* Add optional field types, including PHP-based fields
* Customize themes to display data more attractively and legibly
* Build powerful Views query displays
* Integrate with SQL databases
* Customize Views with relationships, arguments, and filters
* Optimize query performance
* Add custom styles with the Panels module
* Maintain full control over sites as you deploy into production

This book will help you create more powerful, flexible, usable, and manageable Web sites - whether you're a Web developer, designer, administrator, architect, or consultant.

The accompanying Web site contains all examples, code, and themes presented in this book.

CONTENTS:

The Node System 3

What You Should Know Before Creating Fields and Content Types 17

Choosing Field Types 39

Theme Basics 59

Using the CCK API 75

Drupal, SQL, and the Emergence of Views 101

Views UI 109

Arguments 137

An Overview 153

Balancing Development Time against CPU Time 177

Data Architecture 185

Introduction to Panels 217

Your First Panel 225

Contexts 257

Layout 275

Configuring Your Development Environment 291

Extending the Use of Your Modules 303

Submit a Complete Report 309

Views Handlers 315