Book Image

Drupal 7 First Look

Book Image

Drupal 7 First Look

Overview of this book

Drupal 7 contains features for which site administrators have been clamoring for years, including support for fields, an improved administration interface, better database support, improved theming, and more. You could of course make a laborious search on sites, blogs, and many online tutorials that would promise to update you about every new feature, but there's an even better way to know all about Drupal 7's new features: Drupal 7 First Look is the first and only book that covers all of the fantastic new features in Drupal 7 in depth and covers the process of upgrading your Drupal 6 site to Drupal 7. If you've used Drupal 6 and want to use Drupal 7, you need this book.Drupal 7 First Look takes an in-depth look into all of the major new features in Drupal 7 so you can quickly take full advantage of Drupal 7. It also assists you in upgrading your site to Drupal 7. Some of the new features in Drupal 7 include: Fields API, based on Drupal 6 CCK, which allows you to easily build your own content types Improved user interface for administering your website Built-in support for working with images and files Improved security for the site and users of the site Completely rewritten database layer DBTNG to make working with the database easier and more secure. Improved API for custom module development and user interface theming
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Drupal 7 First Look
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Index

Unmet goals


Like any major development project, there are always a few things that you would like to implement but couldn't complete for various reasons. For Drupal 7, there were two initial goals that were not completed.

Initially, putting a WYSIWYG editor into Drupal was desired to help content editors to edit their sites more easily. However, this effort was postponed from Drupal 7 due to the lack of a standard WYSIWYG editor that could be included and the need for more design to create a solution that will work for a majority of users. Although there is not a full-fledged WYSIWYG editor in core, a number of changes have been made to core to help future integration efforts. We will review these changes more in Chapters 2 and 3. Much of the work that was done for Drupal 7 is now available in the contributed WYSIWYG module (http://drupal.org/project/wysiwyg). We will review the WYSIWYG module in more detail in Chapter 4.

The other main goal that was not realized was the inclusion of Views within Drupal core. This is primarily due to the complexity of Views and determination of whether or not the entire functionality of Views should be included in Drupal 7 or if only a subset of the functionality belonged within Drupal 7. However, several concepts that originated from the Views interface have migrated into Drupal core and the new DBTNG API makes it easier for developers to create complex queries of the Drupal database.