Friday, February 22, 2008

Learning Drupal 6 Module Development

Packt has now set up the official information page for my Drupal book.

This book has a very hands-on practical feeling to it. Each chapter walks through the creation of a module, theme, or installation profile. The goal is to produce modules that actually do something.

The modules cover a range of development tasks, from the fun (jQuery, AJAX/JSON, and XML feeds) to the practical (providing administrators with a special email notification system). More attention has been devoted to some of the new or updated Drupal 6 subsystems, like the Menu API, Forms API, mail subsystem, triggers and actions, sub-themes, and new Javascript.

One chapter covers theming, and one chapter covers building a custom installation profile (that is, an installer for a highly customized version of Drupal).

I'm actually done writing the book (ahead of schedule, I might add). Now, it will go through reviewing and printing before hitting the shelves. My editor tells me that it will probably ship in June. But apparently they are optimistic -- they but the book up for pre-order already.

This has been by far the most fun book I've written, and I think I will stick to this sort of format for future books (at least the development ones).

And if you are coming to DrupalCon Boston, look me up.