Welcome to Drupal 7, the next generation of the popular Open Source content management system.
If you are new to Drupal, you will find Drupal 7 to be easy to use, yet extremely powerful. Over the course of this book we will work our way through the most important features of Drupal 7, so you can begin to gain familiarity with Drupal.
For those of you who used Drupal 6 or an earlier version of Drupal, you will find many new enhancements that are designed to make your day-to-day administration tasks easier as well as giving you additional power to extend Drupal to meet the needs of even the most advanced sites. We will spend much of the book discussing the new features of Drupal 7 as well as how Drupal 7 differs from Drupal 6, so you can upgrade your existing sites to the new platform and take advantage of all that Drupal 7 has to offer.
Chapter 1, What's New In Drupal 7?, introduces the reader to the important changes and new features of Drupal 7. It also gives a brief account of the functionality that has been removed entirely, moved into a contributed module, or removed in favor of existing contributed functionality.
Chapter 2, Installation and Upgrades, deals with installing Drupal 7 and upgrading your Drupal 6 site to Drupal 7. It also covers setting up custom installation profiles, so you can install multiple sites using the same basic configuration.
Chapter 3, Site Building with Drupal 7, shows you how to create custom content types with custom fields, add content to your site, translate your content, and leverage all of the new Drupal 7 functionality. It also looks at changes to the Drupal 7 content management system.
Chapter 4, Drupal 7 Administration, looks into changes that have been made to the Administration interface in Drupal 7. It covers information about the new functionality that has been added to Drupal 7 and areas where configuration options have been moved or renamed from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7.
Chapter 5, Drupal 7 for Themers, walks through all of the major changes to the Drupal theme system that were introduced in Drupal 7. It looks at changes to the template files, JavaScript, CSS, and API. It also shows how to upgrade an existing Drupal 6 theme to Drupal 7.
Chapter 6, Drupal 7 Database Changes, deals with the changes to the database abstraction layer of the Drupal API. It introduces the reader to the DBTNG layer.
Chapter 7, Drupal 7 for Developers, looks at the API in terms of upgrading your existing modules and site code to Drupal 7. It also discusses changes related to the Drupal API including changes to the core system, menu system, Form API, and file uploads.
Appendix, Post Publication Changes, because this book was written before the final release of Drupal 7 (much of it was initially written based on early Alpha and Beta versions of the software) some screenshots and descriptions have evolved as Drupal has progressed to its final release. This Appendix will describe any areas that changed after publication. The Appendix is not part of this book but available online at www.packtpub.com for free download.
Drupal 7 requires PHP 5.2.0 or later to run the Drupal code. You will also need one of the following databases to run Drupal 7:
MySQL version 5.0 or later
PostgreSQL 8.3 or later
SQLite 3.4.2 or later
As always, you can use either Apache HTTP or Microsoft IIS for a web server, but Apache is recommended for best performance and community support.
Drupal 7 First Look is written for site administrators, themers, and developers who have some experience with Drupal 6 (or even Drupal 5) and want to upgrade their sites, themes, or modules to Drupal 7 or just learn more about Drupal 7. No programming experience is required, but several code examples are covered for readers that want more in-depth information about building themes and modules.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "You can increase the available memory and execution time in your php.ini file".
A block of code is set as follows:
dependencies[] = block dependencies[] = color dependencies[] = comment dependencies[] = dashboard ...
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
php install.site.php
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Find the latest official release of Drupal 7 and click on the Download link".
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