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)

Blocks and themes


Themes are a very important aspect of every website as they create the look and feel and are expected to convey a very intuitive and user friendly presentation of the underlying functionality.

Drupal's theme layer is very flexible and powerful, among many things it is composed from a collection of web assets like CSS, JavaScript, images, and of course the HTML template layouts.

Blocks

When looking at a website, it is often very common to notice a sort of pattern that emerges in the overall website's layout. Taking the US government's white house website (http://whitehouse.gov) for example, we can break it's layout into the following parts:

  • The header which is at the top has to the left of it the White House's title, if so to say, along with a logo at the middle and some useful links to the right like contacting them

  • The horizontal menu is the main navigation area of the website, right after the header line

  • The middle top parts wins with image rich content and even wraps around...