Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting

The first definitive, in-depth guide to customizing Drupal web sites with behaviors, themes, and templates - Reaches the fast-growing community of Drupal web site builders and developers, and focuses on the area where they're most desperate for information: customized visual and interactive design - Includes several step-by-step case studies showing how to build and customize sites from scratch - Foreword and promotional support from Dries Buytaert, Drupal project founder and community lead Summary Drupal has emerged as the world's fastest growing open source content management system and framework: it is empowering thousands of individuals and organizations with tools to quickly build and update web sites of virtually all kinds.

As web designers and developers adopt Drupal, they quickly find themselves wanting to customize the visuals and interactivity of the sites Drupal creates. Drupal offers powerful front-end customization capabilities, but practical information about using them has been scarce - until now. Front End Drupal fills this sizable marketplace gap by focusing on visual and interactive design, rather than module development. Two leading Drupal developers systematically cover Drupal customization with behaviors, themes, and templates. Readers will master each layout element needed to style Drupal sites, and learn how to take full advantage of Drupal's powerful templating system. The book also contains several start-to-finish case studies for creating and customizing a wide range of Drupal sites, from scratch. Front End Drupal will contain a foreword by the founder and community lead of the Drupal project, Dries Buytaert.

Praise for Front End Drupal

Dries Buytaert wrote the foreword for the book in which he says, ….

“Drupal has always been a developer’s platform, even with the many designers in our ranks. It’s about time those designers had a great book. In fact, this book is valuable not just to the designers we have, but to the designers we want….” Dries goes on to cite a survey he conducted in 2008 which listed “Finding skilled Drupal designers” as the top entry on the list of the “Top five most difficult things,” according to both expert and novice users.

Addison Berry, Documentation Team Lead for Drupal, and co-author of Using Drupal (O’Reilly, Dec. 2008), wrote a thorough review in which she said,

“…..for people who are new to Drupal this is a freaking gem. Don't think that this is only for newbs though, not at all. This is a serious book, made for grownups, and it expects you to be able to extrapolate from examples and make use of the references you've been given. To my mind that is the only way to really learn this stuff.”

Victor Kane, author of Leveraging Drupal: Getting Your Site Done Right (Wrox, Feb. 2009), has also reviewed the book on Amazon:

I can't say enough good things about this book. It reflects the knowledge and long-time experience of two hard-working and generous professionals. If you are only going to buy two or three Drupal books, make sure this one is always handy while you are working.

David "Keyz" Newkerk:

It's the best "non uber developer" book written for Drupal.