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.

Audience

Drupal 7 first look is intended to be a guide to making a transition to Drupal 7.  It is not intended to be a general guide to Drupal - which is good, because there are plenty of those books on the market already.  This book is a useful guide for the person who already knows Drupal fairly well, but needs help with the changes between Drupal 6 and Drupal 7.  Taken from that point of view, this book is a great guide. Don't expect to understand it if you are a Drupal-naive person (you'd be better off reading the more intro-level book Drupal 7 for that.).  But for the experienced Drupaler, this is a great find.

Content

This book is extremely thorough, and covers almost anything you might want to know about transitioning to Drupal 7, at least as an overiview. The book itself moves from the general to the extremely specific, and at the same time from information that almost everyone might want to read that is using Drupal 7, to the highly technical.  This works quite well.

A table of contents is available online for the book. Please look at the table of contents if you want to learn more about the different chapters and topics covered in detail. Rather than go through the chapters in agonizing detail, let me summarize.

The first chapter of the book is a general overview of what has changed between Drupal 6 and 7.  This chapter covers the changes fairly thoroughly, and is a good guide to the general challenges you'll face making the change.

Chapter 2 covers the installation and upgrade processes.  As far as I can tell this information is quite accurate and reflects the current release candidate state of version 7. .  Any possible changesin the release should not be an issue, however, since 7 was quite stable already at the time the book was writeen. The book appears to faithfully reflect how things will actually work in the final release later this week.

The third chapter deals with using Drupal 7 to actually build web sites. As with the rest of the book this is not a general how-to chapter, but deals only with those aspects of building a web site that have changed in this version, including the built-in support for fields, image handling, interface changes, changes to the taxonomy system and more.  These are all sizeable improvements from Drupal 6 (though some are having a little trouble with the new default administration interface changes) and the book covers them well from a summary viewpoint.

Chapter 4 in particular deals with the administration interface changes, which are a little more controversial than some of the other changes.  They are perhaps a little surprising to the long-term Drupal user, but the clients that I have shown the new interface to in general think that it's much easier to deal with.  This can all be put back to more or less the old form if needed.  The book again covers this in a reasonable amount of detail, at least to the point where it will be easy to comprehend for a long-term Drupal user. This chapter also includes information on the finer-grained permissions in 7, and changes in installing themes and modules.

The fifth chapter covers theming changes in 7, and this is where the technical rubber starts to hit the road.  Theming in 7 is a good deal more elegant, but introduces some new ideas for the experienced themer, and this chapter explains the changes in the theming API, as well as the more subtle changes in how CSS and Javascript are used in version 7.

The sixth chapter covers changes to the database functions in 7.  I think in the long run these may be the most momentous changes in 7, and ones that a clever developer will want to understand. The casual user may not see any big changes there, but a serious developer will need to understand that the database layer in 7 is much more abstract, allowing the use of more different databases than MySQL more easily, as well as moving around some of the database API to make it more regular. Many other changes in the API are covered including the move of fields into core, image handling changes, the API changes for permissions, and much more.

Finally, the 7th chapter rounds up the many small changes in the API that are not database related. This chapter covers the many changes to the hook system in 7, and also provides practical advice on upgrading modules from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7.  All of this information is available in the on-line Drupal documentation, but this chapter in the book is valuable from bringing all of these changes in to one comprehensive organization. Highly recommended for the coder getting used to Drupal 7.

Summary.

I recommend this book highly for anyone who is learning to use Drupal 7, particularly the coder who needs to understand the large changes in the API and the database structures. It's not a book for the Drupal beginner, but the experience Drupal hand who is just learning version 7 will dogear the pages of this book quickly by referring to it on a daily basis.

Purchasing the Book

This book is available directly from Packt Publishing in hardcopy, electionric PDF form, and as part of their online book subscriptoin system.  It is also available from book stores, Amazon, and other online book retailers.  For easy reference, you may purchase the book

From Packt Directly

Drupal 7 First Look at Amazon

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