New Drupal 7.0 Book : Foundation Drupal 7

Friends of Ed, a division of Apress, has published "Foundation Drupal 7: Learn how to use the Drupal framework to quickly build feature-rich web sites" by R.J. Townsend, with a chapter on the Fusion theme by Stephanie Pakrul (aka StephTheGeek).

Drupal is a content management framework that powers web sites from simple online brochures to more advanced sites including social networking sites, blogs, e-commerce sites, business portals, and more. It is free, open source software that allows anyone to quickly and easily build web sites. Its full range of modules—including user permissions, security mechanisms, JavaScript menus, image uploaders, WYSIWYG editors, and more— helps you easily create the foundation for a powerful web site. With its templating system (and a few tips and tricks), any graphic design file can be used to create a Drupal web site.

Foundation Drupal 7 covers all the topics necessary to quickly build Drupal-powered web sites, explaining in simple terms how Drupal works and providing you with concepts, tips, and code snippets for every step of the development process. From setting up a Drupal-ready web host and installing Drupal to using the administrative interface and configuring a site from start to finish, there is something here for everyone. In addition to thoroughly discussing all of Drupal’s core modules, this book reviews more than 50 contributed modules, including WYSIWYG HTML editors, JavaScript drop-down menus, web forms, and even the powerful Views module. Stephanie Pakrul (aka StephTheGeek), creator and maintainer of the Fusion theme, coauthors a chapter on how to lay out and add graphics to a site through Drupal’s administrative section. After reading this book, you will walk away with everything you need to know to quickly and successfully build a Drupal-powered web site.

Whether you’re an experienced Drupal site builder looking to expand your skills, a web developer or designer interested in learning Drupal, or a weekend hobbyist looking to build your first site, Foundation Drupal 7 will give you the knowledge and inspiration you need to bring your ideas to life.
What you’ll learn

• Significantly decrease the amount of time it takes you to code a feature-rich website.
• Understand how Drupal works and learn best practices to quickly integrate Drupal into every website you design.
• Learn how to configure a server and manage multiple websites and staging environments using popular server administration software (cPanel).
• Learn practical techniques to place Photoshop or Illustrator design files on a Drupal Content Management System.
• Have a reference manual and cookbook at your fingertips for help with CSS, popular Drupal modules, website recipes, code snippets and more.

The primary audience for this book is web site designers interested in using Drupal to build web sites. The audience may have previous experience using Drupal but do not consider themselves proficient. They are familiar with coding a basic HTML/CSS web site, although these skills are not required to benefit from the book.

For more information about Drupal Development, Drupal Expert, Drupal Developer and Drupal Programmer visit at http://www.dckap.com
Source:  http://drupal.org

Drupal 7 status update and release plan

Drupal 7 is moving along nicely, and is becoming increasingly stable. We just released a second alpha release, fixing a number of critical bugs, following our initial alpha release in January. Alpha releases are to give Drupalistas something to download and test, so they can report and help fix bugs.

When will we switch to betas? We will switch to betas when the upgrade path from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 is working. Once we hit beta, we will become increasingly strict about accepting any more changes and we'll also commit to making HEAD to HEAD upgrades work.

Finally, we'll start rolling release candidates once the number of critical bugs is zero (or close to zero). To help us focus on critical bugs, we're working on adding a 'major' severity level to our ticketing system, making the options 'critical', 'major', 'normal' and 'minor'. 'Major' bugs would be really bad, but not necessarily block a release. For example, bugs that don't prevent Drupal from working, or that only affect a fraction of the Drupal population would be prioritized for fixing in follow-up releases. Critical bugs are those that badly break Drupal, or that are a major regression compared to Drupal 6.

Where are we right now? There are currently about 150 remaining bugs that need to be fixed. These bugs are real, and not always trivial to fix because a lot of background and domain expertise can be required. As a result, some bug reports seemingly depend on one or two people to fix them. Therefore, it is very important that we encourage and mentor new people to help fix some of these difficult bugs. I'd like to ask all sub-system maintainers to watch their sub-system's issue queues closely (like Moshe did recently), and to provide the leadership to help us make progress. If we do and we work hard, I think we can still release Drupal 7 in Q2. If not, I'm worried that Drupal 7 might not be released until Q3.

In other words, let's all try to put some extra time and effort into fixing the remaining bugs, and let's start to be laser-focused on the critical ones. It would make for quite a party if we could roll a first release candidate in time for DrupalCon San Francisco on April 19th. I would have to sing on stage from happiness, or something.

For more information and updates about Drupal Development, Drupal Experts and Drupal Programmers visit at http://www.dckap.com

Source: http://drupal.org

Drupal 7.0 is released

After nearly three years of intense community collaboration by nearly a thousand contributors, Drupal 7.0 is today officially released and ready for download!
  
Built for community, by community

 Drupal 7 is a truly revolutionary release that saw both the size and diversity of our contributor community grow exponentially. Through the formation of and strong coordination among the Usability, Accessibility, and Design teams, Drupal 7 addresses a number of our project’s longest-standing limitations and opens up access for more people to enjoy the strong web publishing framework we have all come to love.

Huge congratulations to the community, and everyone who worked so hard to make Drupal 7 the most amazing version of Drupal yet!

What makes Drupal 7 so cool?

• Vastly improved administrative user interface thanks to the D7UX movement
• Flexible content and custom fields
• Better visual presentation and theming with Render API
• Accessibility is greatly improved
• Image support is now included
• Automated code testing
• Improved database support
• Better distribution support
• Support for the Semantic Web through RDFa markup
• Over 850 Drupal 7 contributed modules have met their #d7cx pledges.

See the full Drupal 7 release announcement for all the details. Both it and the official Drupal 7 press releases have been translated to over 11 languages.

For more information about Drupal Development, Drupal Expert, Drupal Developer and Drupal Programmer visit at http://www.dckap.com
Source: http://drupal.org 

Drupal.org uses Drupal

Drupal.org, like many non-trivial sites, has a site-specific module and theme. The module, drupalorg is maintained like any other module. The theme, Bluecheese, is in our private Bazaar repository, so users will know when they are on the official Drupal.org. Implementation notes for each are on the project pages.

Drupal.org is made up of a few independent Drupal installations, like groups.drupal.org and localize.drupal.org. This breaks up a complex site into smaller sets of functionality that can be upgraded, changed, and maintained by independent teams at their own pace. We do single sign-on with Bakery and strive to have the sites feel like one site for users.

Key functionality on Drupal.org is project management for modules, themes, and install profiles. project provides projects, issue tracking, and release management. cvslog integrates with version control, but will be replaced.

Search is done with Solr. UI customizations go in the drupalorg_search module, part of drupalorg.
A variety of other modules are used. The most current list is always what is checked into sites/all/modules in the Bazaar repository. More can be added, after careful functionality and security review.
Improvements to all of these are done with the usual patch-and-review workflow.

For more information about Drupal Development, Drupal Expert, Drupal Developer and Drupal Programmer visit at http://www.dckap.com

Source: http://drupal.org