Category: Review

Drupal 7 First Look - Book Review

January 2, 2011 by Steve Hanson

Book Review

Drupal 7 First Look by Mark Noble

Packt Publishing, November 2010

ISBN 978-1-849511-22-3

Drupal 7 is due for release on Jan 5, 2011, so this is a particularly timely book release. Now that Drupal 7 has stabilized, developers are seriously starting to work with version 7, to build sites with it, and to port their modules and themes to run in Drupal 7.  A lot has changed in 7, and it has been more than a little difficult to find good documentation in a single place for what a developer will face in making the transition.  Drupal 7 First Look is a great guide for the Drupal user facing upgrades to Drupal 7 and the issues they might encounter.

Wordpress is Better Than Drupal

July 26, 2010 by Steve Hanson

I think this slideshow and talk makes some really important points for the future of Drupal and our community:

Review - Theming Drupal: A First Timer's Guide

April 22, 2010 by Steve Hanson

Many of you are probably familiar with the book Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting. One of the book's authors has just released a new Ebook for the first time themer.  Emma Jane Hogbin has written a succinct Creative Commons book that is adapted from her big Front End book, but which goes into more detail about how to get started in theming. This book is a very good introduction, leading the novice themer down a gentle path of gettting a working theme while starting with a mockup in Photoshop, GIMP, or some other design tool.

The ebook covers theming concepts, building regions, using template variables, style sheets, and much more.  Although there are many different sets of documentation on theming Drupal, I don't think I have seen  another document that explains so many topics on theming in such a clear manner (and in so few words).  The book is 29 pages of dense, yet easy-to-understand text.  If you follow through the book, you will end up creating a basic theme, and more importantly you will have a pretty thorough understanding of what all those mysterious files actually do, and how you can use them to build more powerful and exotic themes yourself.