The First Practical, Complete Guide to Customizing Drupal Sites with Behaviors, Themes, and Templates Drupal is now the world's #1 open source content management system: Thousands of individuals and organizations are using it to build and update Web sites of virtually every kind. As Web designers and developers adopt Drupal, they need ways to quickly customize the visuals and interactivity of the sites it creates. Drupal offers powerful tools for doing so, but little guidance on using them effectively. Front End Drupal is the solution. In this book, two expert Drupal developers cover everything you need to know to create great visual designs and state-of-the-art interactivity with Drupal's behaviors, themes, and templates. While other Drupal books focus on module development, Front End Drupal is 100% focused on issues of site design, behavior, usability, and management. The authors show how to style Drupal sites, make the most of Drupal's powerful templating system, build sophisticated community sites, streamline site management, and build more portable, flexible themes. You'll also gain hands-on experience through several case studies that walk you through site creation and customization from start to finish.

• Prepare and organize content so it's easier to integrate into Drupal Web sites
• Structure Drupal page layouts that are easy for users to work with
• Implement an efficient workflow for all your site contributors
• Configure Drupal with the modules and browser tools you need to customize your site
• Utilize Drupal's Starter Themes, as well as themes converted from WordPress, Joomla (TM), and Drupal 5.x
• Adapt Drupal page templatesto control the entire site or individual sections
• Customize site content, including individual nodes and teaser summaries
• Maximize the power and usability of Drupal's content editing forms
• Build great community sites with user profiles, comments, and user-generated content
• Use JavaScript to make your themes more powerful, portable, and flexible
• Create powerful animations and AJAX callbacks with Drupal's jQuery library

This guide to using the Drupal open source content management system is aimed at web developers and designers who need to customize both visuals and the level of interactivity on their sites. Hogbin is a noted developer and Drupal expert, and she has teamed with Käfer, a user interface engineer, to describe the behaviors, themes and templates that will produce more flexible and portable web content. Methods are also described for using jQuery to create animations and AJAX callbacks. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)