Team Lullabot is really excited to unveil O'Reilly Media's first Drupal book, Using Drupal, due out next month. (BTW, that's a dormouse on the cover. :)) The book is written against Drupal 6.

Our motivation for writing this book was that most peoples' first experience with Drupal involves getting it installed successfully, but then being left with the question, "What next?" Using Drupal is all about answering this question. It shows in a practical, hands-on way how to combine over thirty of Drupal's contributed modules to build Drupal websites that can do things ranging from product reviews to event management to e-commerce, all through configuration with as little coding as possible. You can also think of it as a field guide to CCK and Views, since almost all chapters build on those base modules.

About the Book

Authors Angela "webchick" Byron, Addison "add1sun" Berry, Nathan "quicksketch" Haug, Jeff "eaton" Eaton, James "walkah" Walker, and Jeff "jjeff" Robbins take you on a guided tour through the amazing Land of Modules, pointing out popular attractions and steering you around the Maw of Module Madness.

From O'Reilly:

If you want to build a blog or community website, this essential hands-on guide provides recipes to help you do it with Drupal—the popular open source web framework and content management system—via the vast collection of community-contributed modules that make this framework unique. Using Drupal shows how to combinine existing modules in interesting ways (with a minimum of code-wrangling) to develop projects such as a wiki, publishing workflow site, photo gallery, product review site, online store, user group site, and more.

Each chapter begins with a "Case Study" in which we lay out a user story from a fictitious client who needs a particular type of website built. Then, in the "Implementation notes" section, we compare and contrast the various modules which might be up to the task of fulfilling the client's needs, and explain why we are choosing to use one module instead of another.

The rest of the chapter alternates between "Spotlight" sections, which provide a broad overview of what a given module can do and how it's useful and "Hands-On" sections which are step-by-step recipes for putting the module into practical use by building out the client's website.

Finally, each chapter concludes with a "Taking it Further" section which talks about other modules you might add to this site to make it even more powerful, or to take it in a slightly different direction. Each chapter has pointers to three or four other modules that help enhance the given functionality.

Modules covered in this book

* Administration Menu
* Advanced help
* Amazon
* Calendar
* Content Construction Kit (CCK)
* CSS Injector
* Custom Pagers
* Date
* Devel
* Diff
* FCKeditor
* FileField
* Fivestar
* Flag
* Freelinking
* ImageAPI
* ImageCache
* ImageField
* IMCE
* Internationalization
* Localization client
* Markdown filter
* Pathauto
* Token
* Ubercart
* Views
* Views Bulk Operations
* Workflow
* Workspace
* Voting API
* and more! these are just the ones used in the hands-on sections of the book.

Where can I get it?

We're currently in final editing phases, and the book should be on shelves next month, along with the Using Drupal website with the source code and whatnot.

In the meantime, feel free to download a sample chapter and table of contents, and if you like what you see you can pre-order from amazon.com (the Drupal Association gets a little kickback). The book will also be available on Safari Online.

Thanks

There were many awesome Drupal folks who provided reviews and insight into the book outline and various chapers, including Dries Buytaert, Michelle Cox, Earl Miles, and José Royero and we want to thank you all. We would like to give thanks to Ivan Zugec for graciously giving us the usingdrupal.com domain name for this site after the book's title changed for the third or fourth time. ;) Please check out his Drupal tutorials and screencasts.