The Agaric Drupal Book

We are going to write a Drupal book, so we have to plan important stuff, like the title

Titles?
Drupal: The Living Web

Subtitles?
Building web sites for people

How to do Drupal sustainably

by the Agaric Collective
and friends

Topics

We think it would take a year overall, starting in June, with a complete draft to you by March 2010. Our book would be about how to do Drupal sustainably, including managing change in Drupal, so it would be well-placed for a Drupal 6 to 7 transition period. I am not fitting it into either series so well, but we could have the detailed breakdown and an attempt at Experience ingredients in two weeks.

Each section would be two-three chapters.

• Building sites: How to approach and where to look for more information
• Getting a head start: solving the problem Installation Profiles are supposed to solve
• Managing projects and communicating with clients
• Development, deployment and managing change: version control systems and so much more (DBscripts)
• Documenting and teaching
• Getting involved in and giving back to the Drupal community
• Communicating among applications, and in particular Drupal sites, with semantic RDF data.

Agaric Drupal 7 Book

Some of the above (managing projects, the full answer to managing change) is too much to do in a book that has to cover everything new with Drupal 7, but we should still figure out:

What must we figure out ourselves so well that we will also be able to write about it?

Introduction

A new release is a great time to get involved with Drupal. You can step in front of more experienced users and developers who are tied to old sites and even old ways of thinking.

Given the vast, expanding Drupal universe that affords an infinite number of topics, we chose what to cover in this book by answering a few simple questions:

• What do I need to know to use Drupal? (if someone else has already installed it)
• What do I need to know to build a site with Drupal? (The answer to this question, of course, is "what kind of site?" and we try to answer for a couple common needs.)
• What do I need to know to make Drupal look how I want?
• What do I need to know to develop new functionality for Drupal?

Building Simple Sites

A point throughout the book will be to not hide information from the reader that they should have at that point. So "building simple sites" will have, or be preceded by, enough information on version control and back-ups that the reader won't be building an unmaintainable site or losing their data.

Resolution