Over 100 clear step-by-step recipes to create powerful, great-looking Drupal themes.

Over 40 recipes to harness the power of Panels for building attractive Drupal websites.

Create complex websites quickly and easily using the building blocks of Drupal 8, the most powerful version of Drupal yet About This Book Build complete, complex websites with no prior knowledge of web development entirely using the intuitive Drupal user interface Follow a practical case study chapter-by-chapter to construct a complete website as you progress Ensure your sites are modern, responsive and mobile-friendly through utilizing the full features available in Drupal 8 Who This Book Is For If you want to learn to use Drupal 8 for the first time, or you are transitioning over from a previous version of Drupal, this is the book for you. No knowledge of PHP, MySQL, or HTML is assumed or required What You Will Learn Set up a local “stack” development environment and install your first Drupal 8 site Find out what is available in Drupal 8 core Define content types and taxonomies—and find out when you should do so Use the powerful Views module Get hands-on with image and media handling Extend Drupal using custom community modules Develop the look and feel of your website using Drupal themes Manage site users and permissions In Detail Drupal 8 sets a new standard for ease of use, while offering countless new ways to tailor and deploy your content to the Web. Drupal 8 allows user to easily customize data structures, listings, and pages, and take advantage of new capabilities for displaying data on mobile devices, building APIs, and adapting to multilingual needs. The book takes you step by step through building a Drupal 8 website. Start with the basics, such as setting up a local “stack” development environment and installing your first Drupal 8 site, then move on to image and media handling, and extending Drupal modules. Push your knowledge by getting to grips with the modular nature of Drupal, and learning to extend it by adding new functionalities to create your new modules. By the end of the book, you will be able to develop and manage a modern and responsive website using Drupal. Style and approach This is an absolute beginners' guide, providing step-by-step instructions to help you learn Drupal 8 from scratch.

This book is a best fit for backend developers with a basic knowledge of Drupal's APIs and some experience using the command line. Perhaps you already worked on one or two Drupal projects, but have never dived deep into Drush's toolset. In any case, this book will give you a lot of advice by covering real-world challenges in Drupal projects that can be solved using Drush.

“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.

Over 100 clear step-by-step recipes to create powerful, great-looking Drupal themes Take control of the look and feel of your Drupal website Tips and tricks to get the most out of Drupal's theming system Learn how to customize existing themes and create unique themes from scratch Part of Packt's Cookbook series: Each recipe is a carefully organized sequence of instructions to complete the task as efficiently as possible In Detail Themes are among the most powerful features that can be used to customize a website to fit your needs. The greatest strength of Drupal lies in its design, which, when done right, allows developers to customize every aspect of the site. Although it might sound easy to customize the look of your site, it's not a cakewalk to build custom themes that are easy to administer and maintain. Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook provides a plethora of recipes that enable Drupal template designers to make full use of Drupal's extensibility and style their site just the way they want it. It is a well-rounded guide, which will allow users looking to theme their Drupal sites to do so by taking full advantage of Drupal's theming system. It covers numerous aspects from creating custom themes to using the powerful CCK, Views, and Panels modules to create rich designs that are easy to administer and maintain. Structured as a collection of recipes to perform a wide variety of tasks, this book will guide readers through most important aspects of Drupal theming. It starts off with recipes dealing with the basics of Drupal's theme system: you will find recipes for solving all your problems with regions and blocks. It then moves on to advanced topics such as creating a custom theme and using it to modify the layout and style of the content that is output on a page. A substantial number of recipes are dedicated to Drupal's template system, which will provide you with a solid foundation in order to override the output of Drupal and contributed modules. Furthermore, as the combination of modules such as CCK, Views, and Panels is so widely prevalent, chapters have been dedicated for each of these modules. With this book, you'll learn to get the most out of Drupal's templating system and its modules to create rich designs for your site. A collection of recipes that cover all aspects of customizing and developing unique Drupal themes.