Various terms are used to pigeon-hole Drupal: platform, framework, environment, and so on. At its core, Drupal is a content management system (CMS). Like the other terms, the meaning of CMS can be somewhat abstract and ambiguous, so here is what I feel the terms mean within the context of this book:
- Content: Digital material meant for sharing online
- Management: Manipulation for the sake of usability, continuity and viability, including creating, editing, storing, retrieving, indexing, searching, reviewing, moderating, and translating
- System: A cohesive collection of functionality
Put the three together, and you have Drupal at its heart: a primarily used to make digital material available to users of the World Wide Web.
Drupal offers a breadth and depth of capabilities, with a strong baseline functionality that's greatly expandable via a high degree of customization. There is a cost associated with this, and with any product that offers broad personalization, and that is a learning curve that is not insignificant. Think about your first interactions with a car's display console, a smart watch, or even the New York subway system, and you will likely recall an initial paralysis when deciding the first thing to do; for some, there is nothing intuitive in the experience.
My hope, and the goal of this book, is to ease your way into Drupal, demystifying the manner in which to accomplish the more common content management activities.
This book is ideal for web developers who are looking to create professional web applications using Drupal 8. You should have some previous experience with Drupal and must have a basic knowledge of web application development in general. If you are looking to create fluent professional websites that will take you to the next level, then this book is for you.
Chapter 1, Finding Your Way around Drupal, will give you a step-by-step installation guide on creating a new Drupal site. You will also look at some of the major sections of the Drupal home page and administrative navigation.
Chapter 2, Structuring Content Types, will explore the fundamentals of Drupal content types and explains why we would want to create one. You will also look at content type fields, what they are, and what type fields are available. Gradually, you will also get to know how to create content types and add fields to content types as well.
Chapter 3, Managing Users, will brief you about users, covering all the major aspects of managing users, including roles and permissions for working with the content. You will also learn about the types of users and how Drupal can ensure limited access.
Chapter 4, Creating and Editing Content, will guide you through how to create and edit content. You will also learn how to configure the editor for various roles and how to define a custom URL for content as well.
Chapter 5, Making Drupal Even More Useful, will tell you what modules are, introduce their sources, and explain how to enable them. You will also explore a few of the more popular modules that extend Drupal's usefulness for users focused on content.
Chapter 6, Grabbing Global Readership, will tell you how to use Drupal's translation features. You will learn how to declare additional languages and how to enable the user to select their preferred language. You will also learn how to add icons that are used by site visitors and import user interface translations.
Chapter 7, Feeding the Masses - RSS, will tell you all about what an RSS feed is and how to create content meant for such a feed. You will also learn about the views module, what views are, and how to create a view with multiple feed displays.
Chapter 8, Welcome Home!, will guide you through how to improve a weak home page by editing its view, by providing an archive and recent content block, and by changing the footer menu.
In order to work with Drupal 8, and to run the code examples found in this book, the following software will be required:
- Web server: Apache (recommended)
- Database: MySQL
- PHP
We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/9781789340310_ColorImages.pdf.
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Mount the downloaded WebStorm-10*.dmg disk image file as another disk in your system."
Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Select System info from the Administration panel."
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