Pro Drupal development

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…ks out of the box! Get a book or two. The Lullabot.com folks seem to be good teachers. In particular, if you find yourself wanting to write PHP for Drupal, get a copy of Pro Drupal Development and sleep with it under your pillow. As it happens, my email thing is not public code. But perhaps it could be. I seem to have already identified one potential user! But the stuff I wrote would have to be factored out and turned into a plugin for Organic Groups, or perhaps interfaced with the Actions Module.

…le modules that can (at least in theory, but often in practice as well) be manipulated by noncoders. If you want to try Drupal and you are a coder you must read VanDyk's Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition ASAP. Trust me on this. As for Javascript, which is arguably more important: jQuery, jQuery, jQuery. Also: Douglas Crockford, Javascript: The Good Parts . And learn your CSS if you haven't already; I did that by reading Eric Meyer's O'Reilly book, followed by Dan Cederholm's book.

Buy and read Pro Drupal Development by VanDyk and Westgate. The theming chapter alone is worth the price of the book. The book is very good, but it doesn't really cover CCK and Views, which are two very important modules that form the center of a lot of Drupal sites. Make sure to learn about those on your own. Visit a user group, if you've got one nearby, and ask questions. The folks at Lullabot offer tutorials on Drupal site setup, theming, and advanced programming. They're a fun crew and I suspect their classes are pretty good, if you have the tuition and travel budget for them. Their podcast is fun also, and much less expensive. It's not tightly edited -- the individual episodes are kind of long and rambling, and you might want to listen to them with a beer in one hand, to get into the proper spirit. I keep meaning to watch the screenc…