Less than two years ago, I wrote the foreword for the first edition of this book. What was missing at that time was a developer book for Drupal. By writing the first version of this book, John VanDyk and Matt Westgate made an incredible contribution to Drupal’s steady growth. I don’t think I know a single Drupal developer who doesn’t own a copy of the first Pro Drupal Development book. Drupal, through its open source nature, has become much greater than I ever im- ined it would. The Drupal developer community has a healthy desire to innovate, to respond to the ever-changing landscape of web development, and to provide web dev- opers an almost infinite amount of flexibility. Change is a constant in the Drupal c- munity and key to our success. Since the first edition of this book was published, we released Drupal 6, a big step forward, with new and improved APIs. In fact, Drupal 6 had over 700 individual contri- tors who have patches included in the core code. Together, we’ve made important theme system improvements, better support for multilingual web sites, an improved menu s- tem, form API improvements, JavaScript goodies, and much more. The net result is that Drupal 6 is an even better web application development platform than Drupal 5. Probably to John and Matt’s despair (sorry!), all of the chapters of the original edition of Pro Drupal Development went partially out of date.
This second edition covers Drupal 6, the first book to cover the latest version of Drupal
Only book to cover Drupal internals and customization in detail
Written by a Drupal core developer
Common pitfalls identified and addressed
Foreword by Dries Buytaert, Drupal Founder
Pro Drupal Development is a book geared to professionals that need to deploy and customize Drupal. This book delves deep into the internals of the Drupal system and teaches the reader everything they will need to know to deploy a highly customized and optimized Drupal installation. Every web developer looking to deploy web sites quickly to their clients while still being able to harness the power of an excellent content management system needs this book.
John VanDyk
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