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

What is DBTNG?


DBTNG is the new database abstraction layer that makes connecting to and querying the database much easier in Drupal 7 than it was in the previous version of Drupal. DBTNG is an acronym for Database Layer: The Next Generation.

Background

DBTNG was built with the intention of making it easier to support additional types of databases. Prior to Drupal 7, it was theoretically possible to create a Drupal-compliant compatibility layer to support any database. However, this required quite a lot of custom code and each custom module typically needed to add customized SQL statements to support multiple databases. In practice, this meant that Drupal only fully supported MySQL and PostgreSQL. Most contributed modules only supported MySQL although some also supported PostgreSQL. Site administrators who wanted to use a different database needed to do a great deal of work to migrate modules or build their own modules with support for their database of choice.

Some of the other key goals for...