"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! , 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 JavaScript 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.

Table of Contents

Foreword xvii Preface xix Acknowledgments xxiii About the Authors xxv Chapter 1: Web Page Design 1 Describing Content 2 Organizing Lists of Content 8 Page Design and Layout 14 Interaction 20 Code 22 Work Flow 25 Summary 29 Chapter 2: The Themers' Toolkit 31 A Gentle Introduction 32 Theming Strategies 33 Drupal Terminology 36 Must-Have Modules 42 Browser Tools 60 Language References 65 Maintaining Your System 69 Summary 71 Chapter 3: Working with Drupal Themes 73 Finding Themes 74 Installing Drupal Themes 78 Administering Themes 82 Anatomy of a Theme 88 Starter Themes 94 Migrating to Drupal 6 99 Summary 104 Chapter 4: The Drupal Page 107 Elements of a Page 107 Sitewide Page Variables 109 Navigation and Menus 115 Grid Work 120 Search 126 Changing Templates 128 Alias: Page 133 Taxonomy Templates 138 Delivering Plain Content 141 Summary 149 Chapter 5: Drupal Content 151 Node Templates 151 Gaining More Control Than $content Provides 155 Node Template Variables 161 Pages and Teasers 165 Images 169 Making Lists of Content with Views 177 Summary 181 Chapter 6: Customizing the Content-Editing Forms 183 Web Forms 184 Form Candy 185 Rich Text Editing 195 Altering Forms with FAPI 201 Multiple-Page Forms 210 Improving Access to Edit Screens 212 Summary 217 Chapter 7: Users and Community Participation 219 Users 219 Granting and Restricting Access 227 Community Comments 231 User-Generated Content 235 Spam 240 Private Web Site Areas 244 Summary 248 Chapter 8: Administrative Interfaces 251 Creating a Custom Administrative Interface 252 Task-Based Navigation 256 Administrative Menus 261 Administrative Dashboards and Control Panels 266 Custom Administrative Screens 270 Error! 279 Summary 283 Chapter 9: Learning JavaScript 285 JavaScript versus DOM 286 The JavaScript Language 287 Object Orientation in JavaScript 293 Summary 309 Chapter 10: An Introduction to jQuery 311 A First Look at jQuery 313 Using jQuery 320 Leveraging jQuery's Full Potential 333 Using Other JavaScript Libraries 343 Summary 344 Chapter 11: JavaScript in Drupal 345 Server-Side Drupal Integration 345 Architecting a Component 353 Example: Horizontal Scroller 355 Using Plugins and jQuery UI 377 Summary 380 Appendix A: Installing Drupal 381 Setting Up a Development Server 381 Configuring Document Root and Virtual Hosts 383 Installing Drupal--and Common Hurdles to Its Installation 385 A Quick Glance at the Admin Area 388 Installing Modules 389 Appendix B: Supplemental Code 391 template 391 demo-module 397 template-skeleton 400 horizscroll and horizscroll-datasource 404 sparkline 415 Index 419

Author Biography

Emma Jane Hogbin has been working as a Web developer since 1996, helping individuals and organizations to realize both their own potential and the potential of their online presence. She creates systems that enable her clients to succeed--by using her infectious enthusiasm and ability to explain concepts without using technical jargon that puts even the greatest technophobes at ease. Passionate about helping people to acquire knowledge, Emma volunteers with the Drupal and Ubuntu documentation teams. She is well known in the Drupal community not only for her technical knowledge, but also for her engaging and humorous means of bringing Drupal to a wider audience--such as the Drupal socks and their GPLed pattern. Through her consulting company HICK Tech, and at conferences around the world, Emma has inspired people to overcome fear, uncertainty, and doubt and to tackle problems head-on. She is known as "emmajane" on drupal.org and chronicles her adventures at http://www.emmajane.net. Konstantin Kafer started his adventures into Web development in 1999. In high school, he led the Web development and school Web site class for several years. While still in high school, he also participated in Google's Summer of Code 2006, doing usability enhancements for the Drupal project. In the Drupal community, he is widely known for his JavaScript skills. Konstantin has been a speaker at several DrupalCons and other Open Source conferences. He is currently studying IT Systems at the Hasso Plattner Institute Engineering in Potsdam, Germany. He also works as a consultant for NowPublic, a large citizen journalism Web site based on Drupal. He can be found blogging on http://kkaefer.com about design, Web development, and Drupal.