When you order Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition from this site you're also giving to the Drupal Association. We're using the the Drupal associations' Amazon affiliate ID so a portion of our profits go back into the Drupal community. Go ahead and grab your copy! (European readers may want to use Amazon (UK)) (Canadian readers).

The first edition covers Drupal 5 (though much of the information applies to Drupal 6). The second edition covers Drupal 6 and will ship in early August.

Drupal is one of the most popular content management systems in use today. With it, you can create a variety of community-driven sites, including blogs, forums, wiki-style sites, and much more. Pro Drupal Development was written to arm you with knowledge to customize your Drupal installation however you see fit. Authors John VanDyk and Matt Westgate delve into Drupal internals, showing you how to truly take advantage of its powerful architecture.

You'll learn how to write your own modules, create your own themes while adhering to best practices that keep your site easy to maintain. You'll learn the inner workings of each key part of Drupal, including user management, sessions, the node system, caching, and the various APIs available to you. Of course, your Drupal-powered site isn't effective until you can efficiently serve pages to your visitors. As such, the authors have included the information you need to optimize your Drupal installation to perform well under high-load situations. Also featured is information on Drupal security and integration of Ajax and the internationalization of your Drupal web site. Simply put, if you are working with Drupal at all, then you need this book!

• This book is written by Drupal core developers.
• Drupal architecture and behavior are mapped out visually.
• Common pitfalls are identified and addressed.
• Chapters provide regular discussion and reference to why things work they way they do, not just how.
• The book features a foreword by Dries Buytaert, Drupal founder.

About the Authors

John VanDyk has been a Drupal developer since 2004. In 2005, he organized the first Drupal conference in Antwerp, Belgium, with Drupal founder Dries Buytaert. John has contributed several modules to Drupal--including the actions, workflow, publish, subscribe, and pubcookie modules--and has been instrumental in the design of Drupal's Content Construction Kit. John's day job is as an entomology professor and systems analyst at Iowa State University, where he teaches undergraduate courses about insects. In his spare time, when not hacking on Drupal, John enjoys squash hunting and raising children.

Matt Westgate is a core developer of the Drupal project and original author of the e-commerce package for Drupal. Matt also wrote the path aliasing module, along with many contributed modules such as tinymce and img_assist. He currently co-operates Lullabot, a consulting/training firm focused on making open source software easy to use and understand.