Drupal is changing the way we create a feature and content-rich website. When I created
my first web-based Content Management System (CMS) website in Drupal, I was amazed
at the power of the Drupal CMS system. It allows me to rapidly create a high quality web
application in a short period of time without sacrificing the application functionality.
Drupal is not only an open source CMS, but is also a web application development
framework. The extensible and flexible architecture of Drupal can be used for any size of
business including freelancers, agencies, governments, universities, and enterprises. The
White House, Digg, Fast Company, Sony Music, McDonald's, and Stanford University are all
using Drupal for their sites.
One of the most important milestones in Drupal was the Content Construction Kit (CCK).
Most of this module has been integrated into Drupal 7 core. It is now called Field API. So
when you install Drupal 7, it will come with this powerful module in core, and you can start
to create custom fields for your site without downloading an extra module.
The Field API module is not just the CCK module moved to the Drupal core. It has been
completely rewritten and redesigned in Drupal 7. It has been optimized to run faster and
work more efficiently. It provides you with more field type options, and it has given you more
flexible options to allow you to create custom fields not only for content types, but also for
comments, taxonomy, and more, that was not possible to achieve before Drupal 7. After
reading this book, you will learn how the new Fields API module works, and understand the
concept of fields and how to implement them.
In this book, we will use Drupal 7 fields to build a fictional website from scratch. We will
explore the power of fields within Drupal 7, then you can apply these techniques to your
own projects.