Stephen Burge - Drupal 8 Explained: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Drupal 8 (The Explained Series)

After you master the techniques in this book, you can build your own websites for companies, charities, schools, sports, or whatever else you need.

However, this book uses a specific example site. Asking all the readers of this book to build the same site makes it easy for us to give you specific instructions, explanations, and screenshots.

Its not essential that you follow every task provided, but by following the flow of each chapter you can get a good understanding of all the key Drupal concepts.

The example were going to use is a website about Drupal. Youre going to create a site with information about Drupal. The project is called Drupalville. Thats going to be the project you use to see how to build and run a Drupal site.

You can also find lots of information, including detailed instructions, updates, and corrections for each chapter at http://ostraining.com/books/d8e.

This book also uses a specific process. Drupal is incredibly flexible and provides you with many options. That is both a strength and a weakness of Drupal. To make things as clear as possible for beginners, were going to use a specific workflow for building the Drupalville website:

Big books are no fun. Theyre expensive to buy, heavy to carry, and often written in long, complicated sentences, paragraphs, and chapters that go on and on while the text grows and the words grow longer and more obscure as the author tries to show their verbosity and vocabulary, examining the thesaurus for words that describe, narrate, impress, and fill up space but never quite get to the point so that you end up going back to the beginning of the long confusing text and try to reread, but then you start wondering whats for dinner or whats on TV instead.

Yes, this book will also include some bad jokes.

This book is as small as possible because it leaves things out.

Youre going to read that time and time again, but its worth repeating: This book will leave things out.

You will focus on only the most important parts of Drupal so that you can understand them as easily as possible.

This book is not comprehensive. It does not contain everything you could know about Drupal. It contains only what a Drupal beginner needs to know.

This book uses almost no code

You do not need to know any HTML and CSS to use this book. That is a deliberate decision because we want to make this book accessible to ordinary people. We believe you dont have to be a developer to use Drupal.

However, that will disappoint some of you because this book does not discuss designing themes or building modules. If you do know CSS and PHP and want to dive into more advanced topics, theres a lot of advanced training at https://ostraining.com/classes/drupal-8.

Things in this book will change

Drupal changes regularly, and so do the extra features and designs that you add on to it.

Everything in this book is correct at the time of writing. However, its possible that some of the instructions and screen shots may become out-of-date.

Be patient with any changes you find. We will list changes at http://ostraining.com/books/d8e. Please feel free to visit that site, search for updates, and contact us if you find any we havent listed.

What do you need for this book?

Now that you know a little bit about Drupal, lets talk a little about this book, Drupal 8 Explained.

You need only two things to follow along with this book:

• A computer with an Internet connection
• A hosting account or computer where you can install Drupal

However, before you start, you probably need to know something about Drupal. Turn to Chapter 1 and lets get started!

2

About OSTraining

Drupal 8 Explained is one of a series of books from OSTraining.

As readers and writers, we wanted a new way to publish books.

Old-fashioned paperback books are often out-of-date and expensive.

Books from OSTraining are constantly updated, and affordable. If you the OSTraining Book Club, you can get access to many books for the price of one.

Find out more: https://ostraining.com/books.

3

About Pantheon

This book was made possible by the support of Pantheon.

We host our Drupal sites with Pantheon and love the features and support.

The Pantheon founding team built some of the biggest and most famous Drupal sites in the world. They really know Drupal. Pantheons goal is to provide the most complete, bulletproof, and creativity-enabling platform for websites.

Pantheon provides you with a built-in development workflow, managed security, and the highest performance possible. Plus, you get expert support from real developers.

Check them out at http://pantheon.io.

4

About the Authors

Stephen Burge has split his career between teaching and web development. In 2007, he combined the two by starting to teach web development. His company, OSTraining, now teaches Drupal classes around the world and online. Stephen is originally from England, and now lives in Florida.

Cindy McCourt is an experienced Drupal trainer, who coaches clients side-by-side to build internal Drupal capacity while planning and developing their Drupal solutions. She specializes in user experience planning, configuration, and code strategizing, site building and project management.