Drupal's Building Blocks: Quickly Building Web Sites with CCK, Views, and Panels

“Even if you’re already a seasoned Drupal user of CCK, Views, or Panels, I’ve no doubt that this book will provide you with several new techniques and methods for getting the most out of these extremely essential modules. It certainly has for me.”

—Dries Buytaert, founder and project lead of Drupal, and CTO of Acquia

With Drupal, Web professionals can create full-featured Web sites with just a few clicks. Drupal’s core is compact and well documented, but much of Drupal’s immense power lies elsewhere—in external modules. Drupal’s Building Blocks is an authoritative tutorial, reference, and cookbook for Drupal’s most valuable modules.

The authors are Drupal insiders who’ve spent years creating and supporting these modules—Earl Miles, developer of the Views and Panels modules, and Lynette Miles, Drupal documentation team member. They’ve brought together indispensable information you won’t find anywhere else, as well as extensive sample “recipe” code designed for easy adaptation and reuse. Learn how to

Use Content Construction Kit (CCK) to customize your data input forms around your needs
Improve site flexibility with Drupal’s node system
Add optional field types, including PHP-based fields
Customize themes to display data more attractively and legibly
Build powerful Views query displays
Integrate with SQL databases
Customize Views with relationships, arguments, and filters
Optimize query performance
Add custom styles with the Panels module
Maintain full control over sites as you deploy into production

This book will help you create more powerful, flexible, usable, and manageable Web sites—whether you’re a Web developer, designer, administrator, architect, or consultant.

The accompanying Web site contains all examples, code, and themes presented in this book.

Customer Reviews:

Desperately needs revising

By Neal J. Burns - February 14, 2011

I gave this book 4 stars only because I am pretty sure it's the only book that covers a lot of the material and I don't want to deter people from reading it. If there were other books on this subject, I would have given it 2 or 3 stars. The writers seem to have a poor grasp of the craft of writing; they fly through difficult concepts and are curiously wordy in explaining simple concepts. I bought it primarily to shed light on the mysterious dark reaches of CCK and Views. I admit that I have skipped the chapters on the low-level APIs, but, having read the chapters aimed at users, I feel that I am only halfway to being an expert, particularly on Views. The problems are made worse by the fact that, despite having been published only last month, there is no mention of Drupal 7, CCK 3 or Views 3. I think there is potential in this book, but they need to expand their coverage of advanced uses of Views, add some discussion of the new versions, and preferably bring on a professional writer to... read more

Panels, Now I understand Panels

By D. Reinders - January 1, 2011

I've been working with Drupal for about a year and have struggled. Drupal does indeed have a steep learning curve. This is not news to the Drupal community or anyone trying to learn Drupal. Here is the good news. This book goes a long way toward flattening that slope.

If you've built a site with Drupal you've used CCK and Views but you might not have realized what you didn't know. Earl and Lynette have taken a straight forward approach to teaching CCK, Views and Panels (I'll get to Panels in a minute). They give you the information you need to get going while also giving you the background about why Drupal does it that way and what goes on "behind the curtain". A newbie and a more experienced Drupal user are both able to learn about CCK and Views at a level that is appropriate for them.

I've worked with Panels a little but never quite understood exactly what I was doing and why. I really worked by trial and error. No longer.

This book has... read more

A Great Addition to My Drupal Reference Library

By Tamara Dull - January 5, 2011

I have been a strong advocate of the Drupal project for 3-4 years, but it wasn't until this past fall that I actually started building a Drupal site - and a rather complex one at that. I quickly realized that the steep Drupal learning curve that I had read about - or "learning cliff" as the authors point out in this book - is indeed real. If there's a shortcut to learning Drupal, I haven't found it. But the good news is that books like "Drupal's Building Blocks" is a much-needed, welcome addition to any Drupalite's library - whether you're new to Drupal or a veteran. It includes several screenshots and exercises throughout to provide you with practical hands-on experience, so it does a good job of "telling" you and then "showing" you how it's done.

My background is in relational database design, development and management. In non-Drupal terminology, this book focuses on three aspects of development:

(1) Data storage - Using the CCK (Content Construction Kit)... read more