Book Image

Drupal 7 Media - Third Edition

By : Liran Tal
Book Image

Drupal 7 Media - Third Edition

By: Liran Tal

Overview of this book

Integrating images, video, and audio content on a Drupal site requires knowledge of appropriate community modules, and an understanding of how to configure and connect them properly. With the power of up-to-date technologies such as HTML5, responsive web design, and the best modules available in Drupal's eco-system, we can create the best Drupal 7 media website. Drupal 7 Media is a practical, hands-on guide that will introduce you to the basic structure of a Drupal site and guide you through the integration of images, videos, and audio content. Learn to leverage the most suitable community modules and up-to-date technology such as HTML5 to offer a great user experience through rich media content. The book begins with a practical introduction to the basic Drupal building blocks. It then breaks down each media resource, and explores them in detail. You will learn how to leverage Drupal's community modules to implement support for images, videos, and audio content, along with the best practices for implementation. We will be mentioning ideas throughout the book, which you can extend upon and use to build your own web applications. We will explore HTML5 support for media resources, the semantic web, and responsive web design, which are key topics in modern web application development. We will then build upon this knowledge and add more functionality to our sample website, such as support for analytic charts and customizing images, all of which we will implement using our own custom modules. You will learn everything you need to know about building, extending, and configuring a Drupal 7 media web application.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Chapter 1. Drupal's Building Blocks

Drupal is a free (licensed under the General Public License (GNU), Version 2 or later), community-powered, open-source Content Management System (CMS), which allows creating websites of many types. It's a great tool for both, users with no technical background, as well as top-notch developers, to use it for building complex websites and web applications.

Some examples for popular companies and organizations that decided to leverage Drupal as their content management system are FedEx, Symantec, MTV, and Duke University. The list is long, and you can find out more at http://drupal.org/case-studies or http://www.drupalshowcase.com.

In this chapter, we will cover:

  • Nodes and Entities

  • Creating custom content types

  • Managing fields for content types

Drupal began back in 1999 with Dries Buytaert starting to develop his idea for a forum platform, and has greatly evolved into a leading and award-winning software. Since then, it has seen significant growth. Today, it powers millions of websites and has positioned itself as a candidate at the top of the list for websites and web platform frameworks. Drupal has a company behind it, Acquia, which drives for further cutting-edge development, keeping the pace with the technology trends, and serves as a commercial resource for those requiring professional services.

With almost every release, Drupal has managed to reinvent itself, for both its developer community as well as its users. With Drupal 7, it has even more transformed itself into a Content Management Framework (CMF), by providing many abstractions to what content is and how it is handled. This road is setting the path for a large adoption by developers, to create web applications in many verticals, and has spurred a variety of platform niches from enterprise software, e-learning, and e-commerce, to social networking and collaboration software, to name a few.

Drupal 7's technology stack requires PHP5 (5.2.5 or higher) for the application server; MySQL (5.0.15 or 5.1.30 or higher) as the more favorable option for a database server, and HTML/jQuery for its presentation layer. The choice for this technology has no doubt helped in making it popular and easily deployable for hosting companies.