Drupal For Designers

Are you a solo web designer or part of a small team itching to build interesting projects with Drupal? This hands-on book provides the tools and techniques to get you going. Award-winning designer Dani Nordin guides you through site planning, teaches you how to create solid, user-centered design for the Drupal framework, and shows you tricks for using real, honest-to-goodness, developer Ninja Magick. This book is a compilation of three short guides—Planning Drupal Projects, Design and Prototyping for Drupal, and Drupal Development Tricks for Designers—plus exclusive "director’s material." If you’re familiar with HTML and CSS, but struggling with Drupal’s learning curve, this is the book you’ve been looking for. Get extra material, including an expanded Grids chapter, more recommended modules, and a Short Form Project plan Learn how to work user-centered design practices into Drupal projects Choose the right modules for your project, and discover several go-to modules Use strategies for sketching, wireframing, and designing effective layouts Manage Drupal’s markup, including code generated by the powerful Views module Learn how to work with Drupal on the command line Set up your development environment and collaborate with other designers and developers Learn the basics of Git, the free open source version control system

Are you a solo web designer or part of a small team itching to build interesting projects with Drupal? This hands-on book provides the tools and techniques to get you going. Award-winning designer Dani Nordin guides you through site planning, teaches you how to create solid, user-centered design for the Drupal framework, and shows you tricks for using real, honest-to-goodness, developer Ninja Magick. This book is a compilation of three short guides{u2014}Planning Drupal Projects, Design and Prototyping for Drupal, and Drupal Development Tricks for Designers{u2014}plus exclusive "director{u2019}s material." If you{u2019}re familiar with HTML and CSS, but struggling with Drupal{u2019}s learning curve, this is the book you{u2019}ve been looking for. Get extra material, including an expanded Grids chapter, more recommended modules, and a Short Form Project plan Learn how to work user-centered design practices into Drupal projects Choose the right modules for your project, and discover several go-to modules Use strategies for sketching, wireframing, and designing effective layouts Manage Drupal{u2019}s markup, including code generated by the powerful Views module Learn how to work with Drupal on the command line Set up your development environment and collaborate with other designers and developers Learn the basics of Git, the free open source version control system.

If you're a solo website designer or part of a small team itching to build interesting projects with Drupal, this concise guide will get you started. Drupal’s learning curve has thrown off many experienced designers, particularly the way it handles design challenges. This book shows you the lifecycle of a typical Drupal project, with emphasis on the early stages of site planning. Learn how to efficiently estimate and set up your own project, so you can focus on ways to make your vision a reality, rather than let project management details constantly distract you. Plan and estimate your project by discovering your client’s goals and audience perceptions Discover how Drupal works under the hood, and learn basic DrupalSpeak Frame the UX design challenge through a deeper understanding of your site’s intended users Get real content for your project as early as possible—before you start prototyping Choose the right modules for your project, and learn about several go-to modules Understand how to walk clients through the Drupal design and development process

Award-winning designer Nordin guides readers through site planning, teaches how to create solid, user-centered design, and shows new tricks. Site builders and designers familiar with HTML and CSS get a compilation of three short guides on planning, design, and prototyping for Drupal.

How can you help your Drupal website continue to perform at the highest level as it grows to meet demand? This comprehensive guide provides best practices, examples, and in-depth explanations for solving several performance and scalability issues. You’ll learn how to apply coding and infrastructure techniques to Drupal internals, application performance, databases, web servers, and performance analysis. Covering Drupal versions 7 and 8, this book is the ideal reference for everything from site deployment to implementing specific technologies such as Varnish, memcache, or Solr. If you have a basic understanding of Drupal and the Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) stack, you’re ready to get started. Establish a performance baseline and define goals for improvement Optimize your website’s code and front-end performance Get best and worst practices for customizing Drupal core functionality Apply infrastructure design techniques to launch or expand a site Use tools to configure, monitor, and optimize MySQL performance Employ alternative storage and backend search options as your site grows Tune your web servers through httpd and PHP configuration Monitor services and perform load tests to catch problems before they become critical

“For Drupal to succeed, we need books like this.” –Dries Buytaert, Drupal founder and project lead “Drupal faces a common problem on the Web–the relative lack of new, high quality themes. Front End Drupal tackles this problem directly and is designed to help both experienced designers and rank novices get an understanding of how Drupal theming works. In fact, I’ll be the first to admit I learned a lot from this book.” – Dries Buytaert, Drupal founder and project lead The Practical, Complete Guide to Customizing Drupal Sites with Behaviors, Themes, and Templates Drupal is now the world’s #1 open source content management system: Thousands of individuals and organizations are using it to build and update Web sites of virtually every kind. As Web designers and developers adopt Drupal, they need ways to quickly customize the visuals and interactivity of their sites. Drupal offers powerful tools for doing so, but little guidance on using them effectively. Front End Drupal is the solution. In this book, two expert Drupal developers cover everything you need to know to create great visual designs and state-of-the-art interactivity with Drupal’s behaviors, themes, and templates. Front End Drupal is 100% focused on issues of site design, behavior, usability, and management. The authors show how to style Drupal sites, make the most of Drupal’s powerful templating system, build sophisticated community sites, streamline site management, and build more portable, flexible themes. You’ll also gain hands-on experience through several case studies that walk you through the customization of everything from page templates to Web site forums. Prepare and organize content so it’s easier to integrate into Drupal Web sites Structure Drupal page templates that are easy to work with Configure Drupal with the modules and browser tools you need to customize your site Utilize Drupal’s Starter Themes and themes converted from WordPress, Joomla!TM, and Drupal 5.x Maximize the power and usability of Drupal’s content editing forms Build usable community sites with user profiles, comments, and user-generated content Use JavaScriptTM to make your themes interactive and to enhance usability Create powerful animations and AJAX callbacks with jQuery, Drupal’s JavaScript library About the Web Site The accompanying site, frontenddrupal.com, contains all sample code and themes presented in this book.

Itching to build interesting projects with Drupal, but confused by the way it handles design challenges? This concise guide helps small teams and solo website designers understand how Drupal works by demonstrating the ways it outputs content. You’ll learn how to manage Drupal’s output, design around it, and then turn your design into a theme. In the second of three volumes on Drupal design, award-winning designer Dani Nordin takes you beyond basic site planning and teaches you key strategies for working with themes, layouts, and wireframes. Discover how to use Drupal to make your vision a reality, instead of getting distracted by the system’s project and code management details. Learn strategies for sketching, wireframing, and designing effective layouts Break down a Drupal layout to understand its basic components Understand Drupal’s theme layer, and what to look for in a base theme Work with the 960 grid system to facilitate efficient wireframing and theming Manage Drupal markup, including the code generated by the powerful Views module Use LessCSS to organize CSS and help you theme your site more efficiently

“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.