Good drupal books/resources for programmers/developers?

Question

I am starting the website development process for a local charity organization and am looking to house the website within a Drupal infrastructure. I am familiar with how to theme things for these kind of CMSs, so that is not at issue.

I am, however, looking for a good print (or e-book) resource on how to use drupal to its best advantage. I am wanting to develop more modules and functions building on the already extensive list of modules available online and become a part of the drupal dev community.

Although this is a little o/t, I am also open to suggestions on the best WYSIWYG editor out there for drupal. Some research has suggested TinyMCE as a possibility. Essentially, no one at this organization has any coding skills and I want to make it as easy as possible to publish updates, whilst still having more extensibility than say, a feature-rich Wordpress page.

Cheers.

Answer 1

The best one I've found is Pro Drupal Development, which just updated for D6.

Answer 2

Good Choice on picking Drupal for your project.

As far as a book to recommend, I would probably recommend Pro Drupal Development as linked by ceejayoz.

However, as supplementary materials, I would suggest you visit these sites and get everything you can out of them:

1. Lullabot
2. Site Recipes in the Drupal Handbook
3. The Drupal Dojo

Additionally, Drupal Groups has all kinds of groups related to specific kinds of sites, including nonprofits.

I hope this helps!

Answer 3

I forgot to answer w.r.t a WYSIWG editor...

It really depends on what you want your clients to be able to do. I've used both TinyMCE and FCKEditor, as well as BUEditor and a few others. For my needs, I've found TinyMCE to be the best integrated with Drupal.

Perhaps this would be a good resource to help you figure out what you need: Comparison of Drupal WYSIWYG Editors

Answer 4

As others suggested, the best book is Pro Drupal Development.

You can also check the documentation in the Drupal site, the support section and forum of Drupal.

I also found very usefull the IRC chat. If you never used IRC is prety simple to start, here are the instructions, if you use Firefox just download and install Chatzilla, connect to Freenode and then join #drupal-support.

About the WYSIWG editor, TinyMCE worked better for me, I think that's the most complete one. There are a ccuple of modules that integrates TinyMCE in Drupal, I found Tiny Tiny MCE to be the most usefull because it's prety easy to choose which text boxes you want enabled or not.

However, the most porpular module is Tiny MCE editor, with this one it's more easy to choose which controls you want to show but it's harder to define which text boxes you want to have it enabled. I recommend you the first one.

Also, you can always ask here :-)

Answer 5

Right on, buy Pro Durpal Development.

I also own, and DO NOT recommend "Drupal, Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites".

If your users are at the level I suspect they are, you won't need an editor. Drupal offers the user 4 input formats:

FILTERED HTML (sort of like this input screen)

• Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
• Simple formatting HTML tags are allowed like
• Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

PHP CODE

They may post PHP code.

FULL HTML

• Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
• Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
• Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
• Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

UNFILTERED HTML

If you put in proper html it will interpret it correctly.

===========

I'm guessing most your users will be entering filtered HTML or full HTML. Every posting screen includes a preview option, so they can see what they are getting.

Answer 6

I would highly recommend the Safari Books Online tool from O'Reilly. You can access many other books that are essential to Drupal work (PHP, MySQL, jquery, security, etc.) and O'Reilly just released one of the best new Drupal books out there, Using Drupal. It pays for itself really quick if you can stand to read reference books online which I actually enjoy.

Answer 7

I'm in similar shoes, as I'm working for a non-profit project that is utilizing Drupal for the CMS and I'm teaching myself under-the-hood aspects of Drupal as we go along.

I can say that Pro Drupal Development 6 is definitely the Bible for many people in the sector, but the first chapter is a large bite to chew if you have never looked at the Drupal system, before. Knowing PHP and MySQL is definitely a plus before you hack on Drupal, as well.

For starters, I'd recommend Drupal 6 Themes by Ric Shreves, because it seems to be the lack of "design" or the "template look" that turns users off to Drupal before things even get started. If you can master themes, you'll be able to make things look pretty before you tackle custom functionality. Also, Shreves explains a lot of the "hows and whys" for the Drupal theme system, which I found tied back into module development and explained things even better for me.

As for the WYSIWYG, I've only used FCKEditor thus far and it has been fine. I'm probably giving TinyMCE a shot after reading the other responses.

Answer 8

I actually recommend not buying "Pro Drupal Development" as your first book.

I would say buy "Using Drupal". I know people are anti book these days but there is nothing like having alot of material in your hand versus sifting through forums and blog posts.

But I am guessing by now the site is done.

Answer 9

Another big +1 on Pro Drupal development from me. I bought that book a number of months ago, and was extremely satisfied.

Also, IRC is a good resource. If you have questions, the people in #drupal-support on irc.freenode.net are extremely friendly. (They'll yell at you if you ask in #drupal though. That's the development channel. :P)

Edit: "Yell" in a nice way. They're all really quite friendly.

Answer 10

If you are looking for a book which focusses on how to use panels, views and content profile to make a community site, with only out of the box-of-the-box modules. I recommend my new ebook: Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide