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.

Table of Contents

Part I: Content Construction Kit
Chapter 1 Introducing CCK and Nodes
Chapter 2 Field Concepts
Chapter 3 Deeper into Fields
Chapter 4 Themes and CCK
Chapter 5 CCK API

Part II: Views
Chapter 6 Relational Databases
Chapter 7 Creating Views
Chapter 8 Arguments, Exposed Filters, and Relationships
Chapter 9 Theming Views
Chapter 10 Query Optimization
Chapter 11 Views API

Part III: Panels
Chapter 12 Introducing Panels
Chapter 13 Creating Panels
Chapter 14 Contexts, Relationships, and Arguments in Panels
Chapter 15 Panels Theming
Chapter 16 Site Deployment

Part IV: Appendices
A: Other Useful Modules
B: Reporting Issues
C: Views API Handlers and Plugins