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“Even if you’re already a seasoned Drupal user of CCK, Views, or Panels, I’ve no doubt that this book will provide you with several new techniques and methods for getting the most out of these extremely essential modules. It certainly has for me.”

—Dries Buytaert, founder and project lead of Drupal, and CTO of Acquia 

With Drupal, Web professionals can create full-featured Web sites with just a few clicks. Drupal’s core is compact and well documented, but much of Drupal’s immense power lies elsewhere—in external modules. Drupal’s Building Blocks is an authoritative tutorial, reference, and cookbook for Drupal’s most valuable modules.

The authors are Drupal insiders who’ve spent years creating and supporting these modules—Earl Miles, developer of the Views and Panels modules, and Lynette Miles, Drupal documentation team member. They’ve brought together indispensable information you won’t find anywhere else, as well as extensive sample “recipe” code designed for easy adaptation and reuse. Learn how to

• Use Content Construction Kit (CCK) to customize your data input forms around your needs
• Improve site flexibility with Drupal’s node system
• Add optional field types, including PHP-based fields
• Customize themes to display data more attractively and legibly
• Build powerful Views query displays
• Integrate with SQL databases
• Customize Views with relationships, arguments, and filters
• Optimize query performance
• Add custom styles with the Panels module
• Maintain full control over sites as you deploy into production

This book will help you create more powerful, flexible, usable, and manageable Web sites—whether you’re a Web developer, designer, administrator, architect, or consultant.

The accompanying Web site contains all examples, code, and themes presented in this book.

Build social Flash applications fully integrated with the Facebook Graph API

• Build your own interactive applications and games that integrate with Facebook
• Add social features to your AS3 projects without having to build a new social network from scratch
• Learn how to retrieve information from Facebook's database
• A hands-on guide with step-by-step instructions and clear explanation that encourages experimentation and play

In Detail

The Facebook platform provides you with an ideal solution for building rich, social experiences on the web to develop an effective user experience application. Combined with Flash which effectively enables social interactions, you can create a fully functional application on Facebook. If you've been waiting to get started with your own applications and games on Facebook, with this book you don't have to wait any longer.

This book takes you through everything you need to know to integrate your AS3 apps and games with Facebook accompanied by illustrative screenshots and short quizzes.It presents you with in depth coverage of the key underlying concepts such as creating a basic application that runs inside Facebook and exploring the Graph API which greatly simplifies how developers can retrieve data. This book also covers topics on security, permissions and authentication features on Facebook.

This beginner's guide starts off by teaching you about retrieving simple public data and then rapidly working your way up to authenticating users, building powerful searches across the entire database, and uploading photos and other content.

Throughout the book, you'll learn by building two fundamental components: an RIA Facebook interface and an AS3 SDK that you can drop into any project to add Facebook integration. This easy-to-understand guide has everything written as AS3-only projects with publicly available components, so you can follow along whether you use Flash Pro, Flex, or MXMLC - as long as you know AS3!

This hands-on tutorial will present you with a whole new perspective of the three core aspects of Facebook - searching, retrieving, and updating the data .This practical book focuses on how to set up an application on Facebook and how to deal with different contexts like AIR.

By the end of this book, you will be confident enough to set up your own application and create social interactions for users to share on Facebook.

Everything you need to know from integrating applications and games to searching, retrieving, and updating data on Facebook

What you will learn from this book

• Make your AS3 projects more social and personalise them for your users by adding Facebook integration
• Grab information directly from Facebook into your applications by using Facebook's Graph API
• Securely authenticate your users with OAuth 2.0 to log them into Facebook
• Access information about your users and their friends directly from Facebook - no need to make them type it all in again
• Upload photographs, add wall posts, and create events through AS3
• Search on Facebook's databases with the powerful Facebook Query Language
• Build an AS3 Facebook SDK that you can drop into any AS3 project to add Facebook integration
• Easily access both public and private Facebook data from the surface of a graph
• Learn with exercises and fun examples illustrated with diagrams and screenshots

Approach

This step-by-step book gives you an empty shell of an AS3 Facebook RIA, and guides you through writing the Facebook interaction code by means of fun examples, exercises, and code snippets.This beginner's guide focuses on getting you through all the major learning points in a smooth, logical order. You'll also see how to avoid some common pitfalls.

Who this book is written for

If you are an AS3 developer who wants to create applications and games that integrate with Facebook - either on the Facebook website itself or off it, then this book is for you. Even if you have no previous experience with Facebook, databases, or server-side programming , you can count on this book.

We've all sneaked the odd five minutes here or there playing the latest Flash game that someone sent round the office, but creating those games is trickier than it looks. The aim of Foundation Game Design with Flash is to take you, even if you've minimal multimedia or programming experience, through a series of step-by-step examples and detailed case studies to the point where you'll have the skills to independently design any conceivable 2D game using Flash and ActionScript. The book is a non-technical one-stop-shop for all the most important skills and techniques a beginner game designer needs to build games with Flash from scratch. Whether you're creating quick blasts of viral amusement, or more in-depth action or adventure titles, this book is for you.

• Focused and friendly introduction to designing games with Flash and ActionScript
• 5 detailed case studies of Flash games
• Essential techniques for building games, with each chapter gently building on the skills of preceding chapters

What you'll learn

• Learn how to build interactive movies and objects with Flash
• Get a thorough grounding in ActionScript 3.0 and good programming practices, with minimal prior programming experience required
• Discover how to build Interactive Storybooks, Space-Shooter, Adventure and Drag and Drop games.
• Master collision detection, Enemy AI systems, player control, managing game data, basic physics and trigonometry.
• Make use of Design Patterns and Object Oriented Programming techniques to build robust games.
• Understand the strategies for making games fun to play and easy to build.

Who is this book for?

This book is for a non-technical creative person who wants to learn the art of videogame design, but has no idea where to start or where to look for help. It is a lucid, friendly and step-by-step guide though all the technical and creative issues involved in game design with Flash and ActionScript. The book treats the art of programming as a creative artistic tool, and will help anyone who may be afraid of programming to love the subject as much as the author does. The techniques in the book are comprehensive enough to form the basis of career as a game designer, and form a solid foundation for continued study of programming and ActionScript. This book is the missing link that will guide and inspire any curious and creative person turn a good game idea into a reality.

Are you getting the most out of your website? Google insider and web metrics expert Brian Clifton reveals the information you need to get a true picture of your site's impact and stay competitive using Google Analytics (GA) and the latest web metrics methodologies. Which marketing campaigns work best? How do you quantify their success? What indicators should you track? Packed with techniques and insider secrets not documented elsewhere, this book has the expert guidance you need to enhance your brand and increase your site's ROI.

Programming Web Services with XML-RPC introduces the simple but powerful capabilities of XML-RPC, a system for remote procedure calls built on XML and the HTTP protocol. XML-RPC lets developers connect programs running on different computers with a minimum of fuss, by wrapping procedure calls in XML and establishing simple pathways for calling functions. With XML-RPC, Java programs can talk to Perl scripts, which can talk to Python programs, ASP applications, and so on. Developers can provide access to functionality without having to worry about the system on the other end, so it's easy to create web services. This book supplies the details of both the XML-RPC specification and various XML-RPC implementations, so you can get started developing distributed applications in Java, Perl, Python, ASP, or PHP.

In Detail

Joomla! started as a fork from Mambo in 2005, when many of the original developers of the Mambo CMS moved to working on Joomla! It has rapidly grown in popularity and, according to its own description, is a "Cutting Edge Content Management System and one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management systems in the world. It is used world-wide for anything from simple homepages to complicated corporate websites. It is easy to install, easy to manage and very reliable."

While the Joomla! CMS has the flexibility and power needed for complex, full-featured web applications, it is also simple to use to create basic websites. Its powerful, extensible template system can deal many different data types and control of user access, approval of content, scheduling of content display, and rich administrative controls are all included.

Approach

This book takes the reader through the tasks essential to create a Joomla! website as rapidly as possible. The necessary tasks are explained with clear step-by-step instructions. The author's chatty and engaging style makes this book very readable.

Who this book is written for?

This book is suitable for web developers, designers, webmasters, content editors, and marketing professionals who want to develop a website in a simple and straightforward process. It does not require any detailed knowledge of programming or web development, and any IT-confident individual will be able to use the book to produce an impressive website.

Build feature-rich online stores with Joomla! 1.0/1.5 and VirtueMart 1.1.x

• Build your own e-commerce web site from scratch by adding features step-by-step to an example e-commerce web site
• Configure the shop, build product catalogues, configure user registration settings for VirtueMart to take orders from around the world
• Manage customers, orders, and a variety of currencies to provide the best customer service
• Handle shipping in all situations and deal with sales tax rules
• Covers customization of site look and feel and localization of VirtueMart

In Detail

VirtueMart is a widely used component for adding e-commerce to a Joomla! site. VirtueMart covers all the aspects of e-commerce in an easy-to-use fashion and allows administrators to configure the various factors such as those of the shop, selling workflow, payment, products, and more. It also has many other features, which include managing customers and orders, so that every aspect of the shop is handled on-line for your comfort.

This book demonstrates the setting up of an on-line Joomla! e-commerce site from scratch using VirtueMart. It focuses specifically on e-commerce and VirtueMart. It teaches all the aspects of quickly setting up a feature-packed, easy-to-build e-commerce site--from basic installation and configuration of Joomla and VirtueMart through adding features step-by-step to an example web site to deployment.

The book begins with an introduction to VirtueMart with an explanation of its capabilities and how you can use it to earn money from your Joomla! site. This is followed by the necessary installation and configuration of Joomla! and VirtueMart to enable you to lay the foundation of your web site. Then it explains configuration of the VirtueMart store, which includes payment and shipping methods, configuring zones, and currencies.

The book then looks at managing products, customers, and orders, and customizing the web site appearance, all through demonstration so that you can build your own store with minimum effort, investment, and time. It also illustrates the promotion and public-relations factors such as banner ads, featured products, coupons, and more, so that you can build a wide customer base. It follows this up with examples of more advanced features such as localization and using extensions for bulk import/export of products to your VirtueMart shop, to suit your individual store needs. Maintenance, troubleshooting, and security, which are essential for running your site, are also explained. There is also an Appendix provided for configuring shipping and payment modules.

What you will learn from this book?

• Install/Uninstall Joomla! components, plug-ins, and modules; install the VirtueMart component and its modules, to start building your store.
• Configure the shop, create and use the appropriate zones and currencies, configure payment methods, shipping methods, and taxes, which form part of the most essential shop functionalities.
• Manage manufacturers and vendors, products and product categories, and watch your VirtueMart shop take real shape with the products you want to sell.
• Configure user registration settings for VirtueMart, manage users and user groups, create and use order status types, view order statistics and order details, update orders, and manage inventory, which will ease your apprehensions about customer service.
• Install and configure new themes, customize the Joomla! template, customize VirtueMart themes and layouts, and use search engine friendly (SEF) URLs to attract more customers to your shop.
• Use VirtueMart's promotional tools such as banner ads, specials, featured products, newsletters, product notifications, and more, which are important factors in determining the success of your business.
• Add further value to your shop by using different regions and region-specific taxes, multiple currencies, installing new languages, and translating the language of the site.
• Learn to add third-party extensions to further broaden VirtueMart functions for bulk import/export of products to your shop catalogue, update multiple product information at the same time using AJAX, and display slideshows with product images to spice up your shop further.
• Finally, learn to move the shop to your server, to back up and restore files and databases, and also about security, maintenance, and troubleshooting as a final step to complete your brand-new VirtueMart shop!

Approach

This is a step-by-step tutorial-style guide, which teaches you to build an e-commerce site through a complete practical example.

Who this book is written for?

Are you a Joomla! user who wants to build an e-commerce store? Do you have a Joomla! site and want to add e-commerce to it to sell products? Then this book is for you! The pre-requisites are simple. You should already know how to build a site with Joomla!, have a smattering of CSS/HTML and perhaps some PHP.