Review of Drupal 7 First Look

Author: Mark Noble

Pages: 288

Publisher: Packt Publishing

Publisher's page: Drupal 7 First Look

ISBN: 978-1-849511-22-3

Summary: Good developer-oriented overview of what's new in Drupal 7.

Putting the book to work

Drupal 7 First Look (hereafter First Look) was released by Packt Publishing in November 2010, several weeks before the official release of Drupal 7 (D7) itself. "Learn the new features of Drupal 7, how they work and how they will impact you", runs the book's subtitle – a goal of interest to site builders awaiting D7's release at the time, and site builders now who've yet to approach D7 months after its release.

As with my previous review of Packt Publishing's Drupal E-commerce with Ubercart 2.x, I wanted to base a review on not just a reading of the book but a hands-on application of it. My guess was that First Look had its sights set on people like me: users with a Drupal 6 (D6) background and an interest in D7, but with little idea of what to expect. The Preface confirmed as much:

Drupal 7 First Look is written for site administrators, themers, and developers who have some experience with Drupal 6 (or even Drupal 5) and want to upgrade their sites, themes, or modules to Drupal 7 or just learn more about Drupal 7.

Sounds good! I decided I'd deploy First Look to set up my first D7 installation and to create a "sandbox" site to use as the framework for future site projects of all types. My only experience with D7 so far had been some toying with the Drupal Gardens hosted D7 service. That service had left me quite wowed with built-in features, one in particular: amazing administration overlays that put my D6 installation to shame in ease of use. It was only when I set up my first D7 installation using First Look that I realized these features weren't part of a unique Drupal Gardens setup, but were part of D7 itself. As First Look notes at the start of Chapter 1: What's New in Drupal 7?:

If you have been reluctant to try Drupal because you thought the learning curve would be too difficult or that it would be hard to install Drupal, you will be pleased to know that the installation process has been streamlined and the administration interface has been made more usable and easier to learn. Several commonly-used features have now been included into the base Drupal installation, so they are easily available to everyone.

Power users of Drupal will also rejoice at new time-saving improvements to make it easier to build custom modules and themes. Experienced users will also benefit from improved organization in the new administration interface as well as other new, built-in features included in Drupal 7.

That's no exaggeration, as First Look makes clear in a list of the ambitious goals that had been set for D7 by its creators. While a couple didn't make it into the final release (most lamentably a built-in WYSIWYG editor and built-in Views functionality), many others did, including improved installation, better interfaces for working with content, and those lovely admin overlays I'd drooled over at Drupal Gardens.

Chapters 1-2: First installation

First Look provides an overview of the above new features (and many others less visible but equally important), followed by lists of key changes from D6 to D7, including functionality removed from D7. After that buildup, Chapter 2: Installation and Upgrades takes the reader to the installation process. The text and screenshots should allay any newcomer fears, showing what to expect at each step (and exactly what's included in, for example, the "standard profile" setup option). It's straightforward even for non-technical users, or at least nearly so; raw beginners should note that D7's simplified setup still requires an existing database, something you'll need to prepare on your own outside of Drupal. (First Look offers a single page directing readers to phpMyAdmin as a likely tool, though I expect most readers will find such a short overview either insufficient or not needed at all.)

If there's one thing I have learned to do in Drupal, it's create one useless site after another. So I had no trouble, not even a hiccup, in creating my first D7 installation and site skeleton. A much more difficult-sounding proposition is upgrading a D6 site to D7, a process to which First Look devotes five pages. I'm setting this task aside until I'm more familiar with D7 itself; when I get back to it, I'll be glad to have First Look's neat 13-step upgrade procedure list on hand as a guide. It looks easy to follow, though doesn't address special cases or likely error situations. Perhaps the upgrade procedure is surprisingly trouble-free, but all the same, I'd recommend bolstering your pre-upgrade reading with additional material, such as Make an Upgrade Plan | drupal.org.

The chapter rounds out with a lenthy section on custom installation profiles. These profiles are essentially custom versions of Drupal pre-configured to your liking, with users, roles, permissions, contributed modules, themes, default content, and common settings all ready to go upon installation. This is something I definitely want to tackle soon (my "sandbox site" is nothing other than a more primitive method of accomplishing the same); it's the winning way to replicate a detailed setup for multiple sites or clients. First Look's detailed dissection of the files that make up a custom installation profile should prove a huge help.

Chapters 3-4: Into the building

Chapter 3: Site Building with Drupal 7 forges ahead with creating content for the new site. That includes a succint discussion of creating new Content Types, though for better or worse, the text doesn't walk the user through examples. Nor would I say it goes out of its way to predict likely questions, such as why the familiar Blog Entry Content Type isn't waiting for users in D7.

In the discussion of the Field API, I was surprised to see the many custom field types offered by D7. Here the book is a good guide to the many options that may prove new to a D6 user. The format can be a bit confusing, though: the discussion of some field types is prefaced with a header, while the text jumps suddenly to other field types without a header. Still, it's a helpful overview.

The text addresses tools for displaying fields and labels before moving on to Taxonomy, image styles, and comments. The miscellaneous mentions of new features in D7 (such as the addition of fields to vocabularies, and URL aliases for terms) are of course a help, though a reader might also wish that each section would gather the scattered references to new features into organized lists of what's changed from D6.

Chapter 4: Administration outlines admin features, including a new D7 feature, the Dashboard. And a fine feature it is. But here things get a little confusing in the book. The book's screenshot shows far more Dashboard block options than my setup reveals. That's not a big problem, but the text (p98) directs the reader to an "Add block" link, which I can't find either in my setup or in the screenshot. Clicking "Customize dashboard" does reveal an "Add other blocks" link, but that in turn leads to a form for rearranging existing blocks on the Dashboard, not creating a new block (as the text indicates). As far as I can tell (and as indicated by carefully looking at the paths in the screenshot), the reader needs to step outside the Dashboard discussion and head to Structure > Blocks > Add block. That lets the reader follow along with the text in creating a block – though again, the screenshot for some reason differs quite a bit from my setup. Moreover, the sample block provided (a custom Dashboard block displaying the current size of the Drupal DB) requires the PHP code text format, meaning you'll need to step outside the book's procedures to first create that text format. 

An experienced Drupal user won't have any trouble getting things to work, but a newcomer could get confused by the oddities of this section.

Next up is a discussion of appearance and Themes, with the text explaining how to install a Theme directly from its download URL. The screenshot shows a single "Download" link on a Theme project page; readers visiting an actual project page will instead likely see "tar.gz" and "zip" links. Again, it's no obstacle to progress, but will give beginners pause. (Incidentally, installation via URL works with the tar links for me, but not the zip links. I expect that's simply a matter of my hosting service.)

Chapters 5-7: Advanced content

For advanced users, the book really begins from Chapter 5: Drupal 7 for Themers. Most info up until then can be found and explored on the user's own through admin interfaces; First Look is a helpful guide here, but not indispensable. Chapter 5 onward bring together info that would otherwise have to be collected from disparate sources, including detailed looks at the files that make up themes, discussion of how to use them to theme individual regions, nodes, etc., and plenty of notes on what's changed from D6. Similarly, new and deprecated Theme APIs get a thorough review. (The section on upgrading D6 themes to D7, however, is very short, mostly referring readers to Drupal.org resources.)

Chapter 6: Drupal 7 Database Changes delves into changes to the database that underlies Drupal. It focuses on the new DBTNG layer that sits between Drupal and the database, facilitating use of additional types of databases, multiple database servers, enforced security checks, and complex dynamic queries. This is critical information for module developers. The text introduces the drivers that turn base statements into a database-specific SQL statement, connection objects, data retrieval statements, SQL queries, and more. Module developers will learn how to work with fields, order the results of queries, join tables, prevent duplicate records, and otherwise manipulate data. Adding conditions to queries, tagging queries, and operations on statement syntax are similarly covered, with plenty of code examples.

Chapter 7: Drupal for Developers goes deeper into Drupal 7's API changes, including new, modified, and removed methods. Developers will find out what's new in .info files, as well as what new or modified hooks await within the menu system, the file handling system, URI/URL handling, node access/permissions, and APIs. Finally, there's an overview of Drupal 7's new built-in SimpleTest framework for testing the business logic of modules, followed by the end-of-book Index.

Issues

One problem mentioned above pops up throughout the book: screenshots and text that don't match what D7 itself displays on my screen. In the screenshot on p58, to pick one example, the Content form has "language" among selection criteria for content "items"; my form only has "status" and "type". Further, the image and text say "Add new content"; mine only says "Add content". Likewise, p106 displays a "Configuration and modules" form (and breadcrumb path) and speaks of an "Update existing modules" link, neither of which match my setup. A screenshot (p65) shows a "Length of trimmed content" setting under "Display settings" for Content Types; my form shows no setting. There are many more minor examples. 

Similarly, First Look's locations for things can be confusing, making it hard to locate a given form within the D7 administrative structure. For example, the book lists Account settings, IP address blocking, Profiles, Roles, and Permissions under a "People and permissions" section (p116), all under the admin/config/people/ path. But in my setup, the relevant section under Configuration is labeled simply "People", and neither Roles nor Permissions are found there; they're at different paths reached via a separate admin menu item, People. (Even then, they only appear upon visiting that form's Permissions tab.) As for Profiles, I can't find that at all in my setup, even at the URL listed in the text.

I expect that the book uses a pre-release version of D7 which differs from the release version in many small details. The author's unique configuration (including enabled modules and key settings) may also account for some discrepancies. But those are only my guesses; I see no mention by the author of the Drupal version, the modules, and the settings that underlie his screen shots and paths. I hope this will be remedied in future versions. 

Good book for newcomers, better for those with some experience

Overall, First Look is a guide to the tools offered by D7, not a detailed treatise on the hows and whys of site development. For example, First Look's introduction to D7's taxonomy tools is perfectly workable, but it's not the book to explain why Taxonomy works as it does, or how you'd best make use of Taxonomy in a Drupal site. The look at Configuration options in the Administration chapter seems to thoroughly hit the key settings, though again, it's primarily a guide to what's available. If you want details on, say, the implications of Clean URLs, or reasons to choose a public vs private file system, you'll want to look for additional resources.  

Still, the book isn't without added insights. You'll find some short comments in the Configuration section on why you'd want to enable a certain setting, along with scattered tips on good configuration practices. Occasional "under the hood" peeks can be very helpful, such as the method for modifying user login limits offered on p131. 

My review centered on points applicable to beginners' experiences, but it's the more experienced Drupalers who will get the most out of the book. The first four chapters may be a very welcome resource to beginners whose first introduction to Drupal is D7, or to non-expert users moving up from D6. The remaining chapters are of aimed at considerably experienced users, including those creating themes and developing or modifying modules. Those expert users should find the early chapters enjoyable (if not essential), as "light reading" for getting up to speed on D7 features. 

For more information, see Packt Publishing's web page on the book, including the free sample chapter (links below).

Helpful links for starting with Drupal 7

• Drupal 7 home | drupal.org
• Drupal 7 - Easier and more powerful than ever | drupal.org
• Make an Upgrade Plan | drupal.org
• Drupal 6 contributed modules that are in Drupal 7 core | drupal.org
• Drupal 7 First Look | Packt Publishing (Also see link to free sample chapter, "Site Building with Drupal 7")

Any other good links that should go here?

More to come on Drupalace.com

That's the review; now it's time to get back to my slick new D7 framework and build something on it. I've jotted down plenty of notes that aren't directly related to the book, but that jumped out during my first D7 site creation. Stay tuned for those!