Sites

“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.

“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.

Drupal is a content management framework that powers web sites from simple online brochures to more advanced sites including social networking sites, blogs, e-commerce sites, business portals, and more. It is free, open source software that allows anyone to quickly and easily build web sites. Its full range of modules—including user permissions, security mechanisms, JavaScript menus, image uploaders, WYSIWYG editors, and more— helps you easily create the foundation for a powerful web site. With its templating system (and a few tips and tricks), any graphic design file can be used to create a Drupal web site.

Foundation Drupal 7 covers all the topics necessary to quickly build Drupal-powered web sites, explaining in simple terms how Drupal works and providing you with concepts, tips, and code snippets for every step of the development process. From setting up a Drupalready web host and installing Drupal to using the administrative interface and configuring a site from start to finish, there is something here for everyone. In addition to thoroughly discussing all of Drupal’s core modules, this book reviews more than 50 contributed modules, including WYSIWYG HTML editors, JavaScript drop-down menus, web forms, and even the powerful Views module. Stephanie Pakrul, creator and maintainer of the Fusion theme, coauthors a chapter on how to lay out and add graphics to a site through Drupal’s administrative section. After reading this book, you will walk away with everything you need to know to quickly and successfully build a Drupal-powered web site.

Whether you’re an experienced Drupal site builder looking to expand your skills, a web developer or designer interested in learning Drupal, or a weekend hobbyist looking to build your first site, Foundation Drupal 7 will give you the knowledge and inspiration you need to bring your ideas to life.

What you’ll learn

• Significantly decrease the amount of time it takes you to code a feature-rich website.
• Understand how Drupal works and learn best practices to quickly integrate Drupal into every website you design.
• Learn how to configure a server and manage multiple websites and staging environments using popular server administration software (cPanel).
• Learn practical techniques to place Photoshop or Illustrator design files on a Drupal Content Management System.
• Have a reference manual and cookbook at your fingertips for help with CSS,popular Drupal modules, website recipes, code snippets and more.

Who this book is for

The primary audience for this book is web site designers throughout the world interested in using Drupal to build web sites. The audience may have previous experience using Drupal but do not consider themselves proficient. They are familiar with coding a basic HTML/CSS web site, although these skills are not required to benefit from the book.

The secondary audience for this book is freelance Drupal developers who actively use Drupal to build web sites. They are proficient developers interested in reducing development time and learning Drupal best practices.

• Shows Web developers how to make the transition from HTML to XHTML, an XML-based reformulation of HTML that offers greater design flexibility
• Demonstrates how to work with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)-now supported by ninety percent of browsers and integral to new site-building tools from Macromedia and others-and implement a consistent style throughout and entire site
• Explains how to make a site accessible to people with impaired vision, limited hand use, dyslexia, and other issues-now a legal requirement for many sites in the U.S. and the U.K.

* Walks readers through the process of creating a basic Web site from scratch using HMTL, the basis for billions of Web pages, and then jazzing it up with advanced techniques from the author's award-winning sites
* This updated edition features new material that shows readers how to attract visitors to a site and keep them there, including new JavaScript examples and coverage of cascading style sheets and XHTML, technologies that make building successful Web sites even easier
* Also features exciting new tips and tricks for beginning and advanced users, as well as more expanded examples and samples for users to incorporate in their own sites
* The book moves from basic design and deployment to advanced page layout strategies, showing how to spice up new or existing sites with sound, video, and animation

Practical Rails Social Networking Sites shows you the complete development cycle of a social networking community web site. The project develops first as a simple content management system, after which author Alan Bradburne progressively adds features in order to build a full Web 2.0�enabled community-based social networking site using Ruby on Rails.

You will learn how to make the best use of the Ruby on Rails framework within a large project and how to implement and adapt features specific to a community. The book offers practical advice and tips for developing and testing, along with guidance on how to take your site live, as well as optimize and maintain it.

The book also explores how to integrate with other community sites such as Flickr and Google Maps, and how to make good use of Rails Ajax features. You will also learn how to optimize and adapt your site to work well on mobile browsers.

“Dear PHP,

It’s over between us. You can keep the kitchen sink, but I want my MVC.

With TurboGears, I was able to shed the most heinous FileMaker Pro legacy ‘solu­tion’ imaginable. It has relationships based on fields that change frequently, causing ‘disappearing data.’ I replaced it with an easy to maintain TurboGears application. Defunkifying and normalizing many years worth of munged data took twice as long as developing the TurboGears’s application itself. TurboGears’s excellent set of tools and best-of-breed approach makes it so easy to build applications quickly.”

—Isaac Csandl, Manager of Information Technology, Chicago Legal Search, Ltd.

“TurboGears has resulted in significant time savings for rPath. Before it was released, we ex­pected to spend significant time building a Web framework for our rPath Appliance Agent product. TurboGears sharpens our focus on building a quality application; it allows us to provide more value to our customers, rather than reinventing the Web wheel.”

—Michael K. Johnson, rPath Founding Engineer and Coauthor of Linux Application Development, Second Edition

“I think this is the first time that a Web framework’s functionality has been so obvious.”

—Bruce Eckel, Author of Thinking in Java and Thinking in C++

“TurboGears helped me build more complex Web applications more quickly and with fewer headaches than any other framework I’ve used. Just like Python itself, it made me more productive with a minimal learning curve.”

—Quentin Hartman, System Administrator

“TurboGears has changed the way I develop Web applications, from model, to view, to controller. Thanks to the power of TurboGears, I was able to develop the first version of WhatWhat in less than a week of my spare time.”

—Jonathan LaCour, Development Team Lead, Optio

“TurboGears has provided a way for me to greatly enhance my productivity by real­izing the potential of Web-based agile development with Python.”

—Brandon Goldfedder, Vice President of Engineering, Information Extraction and Transport (IET Inc.), and Author of The Joy of Patterns

“TurboGears really changed the way I schedule project releases: It allows me to deliver them faster and with better quality than when I used to use GUI toolkits.”

—Jorge Godoy, Owner of G2C Tech Consultoria in Brazil, former Lead Developer for Conectiva documentation team

“With TurboGears, I was able to transition my Python projects into Web applications as easily as possible.”

—Benjamin T. Hamilton, Software Engineer

“Norwegian-based company Scanmine AS makes extensive use of Python and Turbo-Gears in all parts of its operation. TurboGears makes it a breeze to build highly sophis­ticated Web 2.0 applications with out-of-the-box features for multiple languages with full Unicode, REST, AJAX, RSS/Atom, and more. This enables Scanmine to put a face on their technology development in a minimal amount of time.

    “It has been said that there are as many Web frameworks as there are Python Web programmers. This apparent Web framework fragmentation has long been perceived as a weakness, until TurboGears came along and turned weakness into strength.”

—Rune Hansen, Senior Systems Designer, Scanmine AS

“TurboGears is a well thought-out framework; the design choices it has made will help you be more productive. TurboGears will give you confidence with its foundation of stable best-of-breed Python components. If you are coming from other languages, consider working in TurboGears and Python to bring fun back into your Web develop­ment work.”

—Jeff Marshall, Partner with FrozenBear

“When we started developing Oprius Foundations with TurboGears, we weren’t sure if it really would help us develop quicker and higher-quality code. After two months, we had a task manager to rival Tada List. After seven months, we had an entire contact management system to compete with the big boys.”

—Jason Chu, Lead Developer, Oprius Software Inc.

“Conventional programming wisdom states that rewriting any working project from scratch is a bad idea. TurboGears was good enough to convince me to do this anyway, and I have been nothing but thrilled with the results. With TurboGears, I was able to implement an AJAX-based Web site with a nice Web API more easily than I ever thought possible. If you are trying to do either of those in Python, you owe it to your­self to look at this project. Using TurboGears was one of the few times in my program­ming career where a task was significantly less complicated than I thought possible.”

—Adam Jones, Lead Programmer, RecursiveThought Software

Master TurboGears: The Easy Python Framework for Rapid Web Development

TurboGears harnesses the power of Python to provide a dynamic and easy-to-use Web development framework: one that
dramatically increases developer productivity, and makes it far easier to create dynamic, user-friendly, Ajax-enabled Web applications. Now, for the first time, there’s a definitive guide to TurboGears—coauthored by its creator, Kevin Dangoor.

This book will help experienced Web developers get productive with TurboGears—fast. You’ll quickly build your first TurboGears Web application—then extend it one step at a time, mastering the underlying libraries that make these enhancements possible. Next, the authors demonstrate TurboGears at work in a real-world application, by examining the code for “WhatWhat Status,” an open source project status tracking application. Finally, you’ll gain deep insight into the model, view, and controller technologies TurboGears is built upon: knowledge that will help you build far more robust and capable Python applications.

Coverage includes

• Understanding the architecture of a TurboGears application
• Mastering SQLObject, customizing it, and using it with TurboGears models
• Utilizing TurboGears view technologies, including dynamic templates and MochiKit for Ajax
• Bringing CSS, XHTML, and JavaScript together in reusable components with TurboGears Widgets
• Using CherryPy and TurboGears controller technologies: from decorators to deployment
• Exploring the TurboGears toolbox
• Ensuring security and managing user access permissions in TurboGears applications

Preface  xxiii

Acknowledgments  xxv

Part I: TurboGears Fundamentals

Chapter 1: Introduction to TurboGears  3

Chapter 2 Getting Started with TurboGears  13

Chapter 3: The Architecture of a TurboGears Application  25

Part II: Building a Simple TurboGears Application

Chapter 4: Creating a Simple Application  43

Chapter 5: Enhancing Our Bookmark Application  59

Part III: Exploring a Real World TurboGears Application

Chapter 6: Exploring More Complex Models in WhatWhat Status  83

Chapter 7: Controllers, Views, and JavaScript in the WhatWhat Status  97

Chapter 8: RSS, Cookies, and Dynamic Views in WhatWhat Status  115

Chapter 9: Ajax and WhatWhat Status Projects  133

Part IV: SQLObject and TurboGears Models

Chapter 10: SQLObject Basics  151

Chapter 11: Mastering SQLObject  165

Chapter 12: Customizing SQLObject Behavior  183

Part V: TurboGears View Technologies

Chapter 13: Dynamic Templates with Kid  209

Chapter 14: Creating Better JavaScript with MochiKit  225

Chapter 15: Effective Ajax with MochiKit  273

Chapter 16: TurboGears Widgets: Bringing CSS, XHTML, and JavaScript Together in Reusable Components . 309

Part VI: CherryPy and TurboGears Con...

“Dear PHP,

It’s over between us. You can keep the kitchen sink, but I want my MVC.

With TurboGears, I was able to shed the most heinous FileMaker Pro legacy ‘solu­tion’ imaginable. It has relationships based on fields that change frequently, causing ‘disappearing data.’ I replaced it with an easy to maintain TurboGears application. Defunkifying and normalizing many years worth of munged data took twice as long as developing the TurboGears’s application itself. TurboGears’s excellent set of tools and best-of-breed approach makes it so easy to build applications quickly.”

—Isaac Csandl, Manager of Information Technology, Chicago Legal Search, Ltd.

“TurboGears has resulted in significant time savings for rPath. Before it was released, we ex­pected to spend significant time building a Web framework for our rPath Appliance Agent product. TurboGears sharpens our focus on building a quality application; it allows us to provide more value to our customers, rather than reinventing the Web wheel.”

—Michael K. Johnson, rPath Founding Engineer and Coauthor of Linux Application Development, Second Edition

“I think this is the first time that a Web framework’s functionality has been so obvious.”

—Bruce Eckel, Author of Thinking in Java and Thinking in C++

“TurboGears helped me build more complex Web applications more quickly and with fewer headaches than any other framework I’ve used. Just like Python itself, it made me more productive with a minimal learning curve.”

—Quentin Hartman, System Administrator

“TurboGears has changed the way I develop Web applications, from model, to view, to controller. Thanks to the power of TurboGears, I was able to develop the first version of WhatWhat in less than a week of my spare time.”

—Jonathan LaCour, Development Team Lead, Optio

“TurboGears has provided a way for me to greatly enhance my productivity by real­izing the potential of Web-based agile development with Python.”

—Brandon Goldfedder, Vice President of Engineering, Information Extraction and Transport (IET Inc.), and Author of The Joy of Patterns

“TurboGears really changed the way I schedule project releases: It allows me to deliver them faster and with better quality than when I used to use GUI toolkits.”

—Jorge Godoy, Owner of G2C Tech Consultoria in Brazil, former Lead Developer for Conectiva documentation team

“With TurboGears, I was able to transition my Python projects into Web applications as easily as possible.”

—Benjamin T. Hamilton, Software Engineer

“Norwegian-based company Scanmine AS makes extensive use of Python and Turbo-Gears in all parts of its operation. TurboGears makes it a breeze to build highly sophis­ticated Web 2.0 applications with out-of-the-box features for multiple languages with full Unicode, REST, AJAX, RSS/Atom, and more. This enables Scanmine to put a face on their technology development in a minimal amount of time.

    “It has been said that there are as many Web frameworks as there are Python Web programmers. This apparent Web framework fragmentation has long been perceived as a weakness, until TurboGears came along and turned weakness into strength.”

—Rune Hansen, Senior Systems Designer, Scanmine AS

“TurboGears is a well thought-out framework; the design choices it has made will help you be more productive. TurboGears will give you confidence with its foundation of stable best-of-breed Python components. If you are coming from other languages, consider working in TurboGears and Python to bring fun back into your Web develop­ment work.”

—Jeff Marshall, Partner with FrozenBear

“When we started developing Oprius Foundations with TurboGears, we weren’t sure if it really would help us develop quicker and higher-quality code. After two months, we had a task manager to rival Tada List. After seven months, we had an entire contact management system to compete with the big boys.”

—Jason Chu, Lead Developer, Oprius Software Inc.

“Conventional programming wisdom states that rewriting any working project from scratch is a bad idea. TurboGears was good enough to convince me to do this anyway, and I have been nothing but thrilled with the results. With TurboGears, I was able to implement an AJAX-based Web site with a nice Web API more easily than I ever thought possible. If you are trying to do either of those in Python, you owe it to your­self to look at this project. Using TurboGears was one of the few times in my program­ming career where a task was significantly less complicated than I thought possible.”

—Adam Jones, Lead Programmer, RecursiveThought Software

Master TurboGears: The Easy Python Framework for Rapid Web Development

TurboGears harnesses the power of Python to provide a dynamic and easy-to-use Web development framework: one that
dramatically increases developer productivity, and makes it far easier to create dynamic, user-friendly, Ajax-enabled Web applications. Now, for the first time, there’s a definitive guide to TurboGears—coauthored by its creator, Kevin Dangoor.

This book will help experienced Web developers get productive with TurboGears—fast. You’ll quickly build your first TurboGears Web application—then extend it one step at a time, mastering the underlying libraries that make these enhancements possible. Next, the authors demonstrate TurboGears at work in a real-world application, by examining the code for “WhatWhat Status,” an open source project status tracking application. Finally, you’ll gain deep insight into the model, view, and controller technologies TurboGears is built upon: knowledge that will help you build far more robust and capable Python applications.

Coverage includes

• Understanding the architecture of a TurboGears application
• Mastering SQLObject, customizing it, and using it with TurboGears models
• Utilizing TurboGears view technologies, including dynamic templates and MochiKit for Ajax
• Bringing CSS, XHTML, and JavaScript together in reusable components with TurboGears Widgets
• Using CherryPy and TurboGears controller technologies: from decorators to deployment
• Exploring the TurboGears toolbox
• Ensuring security and managing user access permissions in TurboGears applications

Preface  xxiii

Acknowledgments  xxv

Part I: TurboGears Fundamentals

Chapter 1: Introduction to TurboGears  3

Chapter 2 Getting Started with TurboGears  13

Chapter 3: The Architecture of a TurboGears Application  25

Part II: Building a Simple TurboGears Application

Chapter 4: Creating a Simple Application  43

Chapter 5: Enhancing Our Bookmark Application  59

Part III: Exploring a Real World TurboGears Application

Chapter 6: Exploring More Complex Models in WhatWhat Status  83

Chapter 7: Controllers, Views, and JavaScript in the WhatWhat Status  97

Chapter 8: RSS, Cookies, and Dynamic Views in WhatWhat Status  115

Chapter 9: Ajax and WhatWhat Status Projects  133

Part IV: SQLObject and TurboGears Models

Chapter 10: SQLObject Basics  151

Chapter 11: Mastering SQLObject  165

Chapter 12: Customizing SQLObject Behavior  183

Part V: TurboGears View Technologies

Chapter 13: Dynamic Templates with Kid  209

Chapter 14: Creating Better JavaScript with MochiKit  225

Chapter 15: Effective Ajax with MochiKit  273

Chapter 16: TurboGears Widgets: Bringing CSS, XHTML, and JavaScript Together in Reusable Components . 309

Part VI: CherryPy and TurboGears Con...

It hasn't taken Web developers long to discover that when it comes to creating dynamic, database-driven Web sites, MySQL and PHP provide a winning open source combination. Add this book to the mix, and there's no limit to the powerful, interactive Web sites that developers can create. With step-by-step instructions, complete scripts, and expert tips to guide readers, veteran author and database designer Larry Ullman gets right down to business: After grounding readers with separate discussions of first the scripting language (PHP) and then the database program (MySQL), he goes on to cover security, sessions and cookies, and using additional Web tools, with several sections devoted to creating sample applications. This guide is indispensable for intermediate- to advanced level Web designers who want to replace their static sites with something dynamic. In this edition, the bulk of the new material covers the latest versions of both technologies: PHP 6 (due out in 2008) and MySQL 5 (available now). The book's publication date is likely to beat the official release of PHP 6, making it one of the first books available on the subject.