Overview
Drupal 7 tutorials related to the book, Using Drupal, 2nd edition, published by O'Reilly Media.
Each course is based on a chapter of the book.
The book and accompanying tutorials were created for users of Drupal 7. For modern Drupal, see the Drupal User Guide.
Using Drupal Book by O'Reilly Media
Background and prerequisites
This short introductory series will give an overview of how the series will work, and how you can line up the book with the video lessons. We also walk through the steps to work with the source code that we provide to go along with the chapters.
Essential lessons
Using Drupal Chapter 1: Drupal Overview covers the basics of what Drupal is, and some history of how we've built sites on the web, in addition to pointing out resources where you can learn more on your own, and get help as you go. You'll get a high-level overview of where Drupal fits in the world of the web, and the major building blocks that Drupal provides.
Using Drupal Chapter 2: Drupal Jumpstart is intended for people who are new to Drupal. It provides a tour of Drupal's capabilities, as well as definitions for its sometimes obscure terminology. We'll demonstrate how Drupal can be used "out of the box" to build a simple website.
Using Drupal Chapter 3: Job Board outlines the 2 most powerful features in Drupal: Fields and Views. These 2 building blocks are fundamental to building Drupal sites. The Field module comes with core and allows you to customize entry forms for entities, like node or user forms, by adding a variety of fields--such as checkboxes, select lists, or file uploads. The Views module is a contributed module that is the natural counterpart to Field, letting you get data out of your site rather than into it. Views allow you to create pages and blocks that pull data back out and display it to your visitors. Anywhere there's a list of content on your website (and most websites are almost all just lists of content in one form or another), Field and Views are the 2 key modules you need.
Almost every website needs some kind of media management support, ranging from allowing users to upload photos to handling automatic media encoding in different file formats. There are many aspects to working with media and through this series will explore core image handling, the Media module, and WYSIWYG. In Using Drupal Chapter 4: Media Management, we'll see how all of these pieces fit together through building the Band Wagon project, which is a music fan site that is going to need the ability to work with images and videos.
With so much information, and so many products, on the web today, people often want to get an opinion to help rank and rate things. Should I buy this widget? Should I watch this movie? In Using Drupal Chapter 5: Product Reviews, we're going to use a handful of Drupal modules to build a product review website that lets community members give their opinions, along with a way to rate their review as well. To kick things off, in this lesson we will review the Super Duper Chefs case study and discuss our implementation.
Managing online calendars and event registration can present a huge challenge. Without a dynamic system, the task is nearly impossible. Generating the HTML required to display a calendar and all the various presentation options (day, week, month views, and so on) is unreasonable; and worse, because the events are time-sensitive, remembering to update "next" or "upcoming" event lists can be onerous. Nothing looks worse than having last week's meeting listed first on your Upcoming Events page.
Even with dynamic systems, you tend to be constrained to certain parameters with fixed options. However, by taking advantage of the flexibility of Drupal and building on the powerful base of Views, you can accommodate nearly any variation on event listings for your site. Using Drupal Chapter 6: Event Management will introduce the following Date, Calendar, and Flag modules to show you how you can build a custom event site quickly and easily.
Advanced concepts
For large, content-driven web projects, building the initial site structure and getting the design "just so" is only the beginning of the work. If more than a handful of people are writing content for the site, the process of reviewing, editing, and publishing articles can be a Herculean task. Newspapers, online magazines, and even many large blogs with multiple contributors need tools to ensure that editors can effectively manage the review process. In Using Drupal Chapter 7: Managing Publishing Workflows, we'll be using Workbench, a series of modules that improve content management and publication workflow in Drupal. We will be building a site for a volunteer news organization, and implementing a full editorial workflow. In the process we will use the following modules: Workbench, Workbench Moderation, Workbench Access, core Taxonomy, and Pathauto.
In Using Drupal Chapter 8: Multilingual Sites, you'll learn how to use Drupal core's multilingual features, along with the Internationalization suite of modules, when building a multilingual site.
In Using Drupal Chapter 9: Online Store, we'll walk through a case study for an online t-shirt shop. In the process you will learn all of the basic pieces of building a store with Drupal Commerce, along with being introduced to the Feeds and Rules modules.
Appendix
