Since this book focuses on development, we won't walk through the standard process of downloading, installing, and configuring Drupal. If you need to review any of this information, the Drupal website at http://drupal.org has a complete installation handbook. We will begin assuming that Drupal is already installed and configured.

In this book, we will develop modules for a fictional website called Philosopher Bios. This website provides news and biographical sketches of famous philosophers. Most of the modules we develop in this book will be reflective of the kind of functionality such a site would need.

While this is the theme of the website, the modules we create will be broadly applicable to other sites, and are reflective (I hope) of the sorts of real-world applications that we commonly develop for Drupal.

I've tried to come up with unique modules (not re-inventing the wheel). However, with such a popular and mature platform, it seems inevitable that I have repeated something someone has already done. The primary goal of the modules presented in this book, though, is to provide instructive and practical examples of Drupal modules.