Trevor James - Migrating to Drupal 7

Trevor James is a Drupal developer residing in Middletown, MD, USA. Trevor has been using Drupal intensively since 2007 and designing websites for over 15 years using a combination of HTML, CSS, ColdFusion, PHP, jQuery, and JavaScript.

Trevor's focus is on building Drupal-based web applications and portals for education, non-profit, and medical systems, and small business environments. He is interested in the best methods of integrating web services with Drupal sites, optimizing Drupal sites' performance, and using Drupal content types, Views, Panels, and other contributed modules to develop front-end interfaces that support data intensive websites.

He loves teaching people about Drupal and how to use this excellent open source content management framework. Trevor authored the following Packt books:

Trevor created a 14-hour video tutorial series titled Drupal 7 for Virtual Training Company ( VTC ) in 2011. The video is available via the VTC website at http://www.vtc.com/products/Drupal-7-Tutorials.htm.

Many thanks, as before, to the Packt's Editorial staff including Vrinda Amberkar, Andrew Duckworth, Shreerang Deshpande, Manali Mehta, and Esha Thakker for suggesting the initial outline and plan for this title and for asking me to write this book. Their guidance throughout the writing process has been excellent, as always.

Many thanks to Gayle Kelch and her team at the U.S. Fire Administration's National Fire Data Center for allowing me to use the USFA's National Fire Department Census (https://apps.usfa.fema.gov/census) data throughout the book. This data is in the public domain and available for download at the URL noted above.

I would like to thank my developer colleagues Chris Desautels, Rich Kucera, and Kris Weinhold for keeping me on my toes in terms of new Drupal developments, inspiring me with their development process, and for helping me to spread the Drupal knowledge to the masses.

Thanks to the reviewers of the book for their guidance on the book's development. Reviewers' suggestions and critiques remain a huge part of the process of making Packt books stronger and more accurate especially in an open source software environment that is changing by the minute.

As before, the book could not have been written without the support of my wife Veronica (a Drupal builder herself) and our twin daughters Francesca and Clare.

This one is for my colleagues at Howard Hughes Medical Institute who continue to do complex and out of the box Drupal development.

Anutosh Ghosh loves coding, but has worked extensively only in the world of PHP and its associated areas, for over five years now. He has a good knowledge of Magento, and has worked on the integration of Magento Web Services with SAP for more than two and a half years.

He is trying hard to figure out the jargon of Java as well, among other things. However, he likes to venture out into other technologies as and when he gets time.

When bored, he gets some recreation by watching cool movies and singing regional songs. However, he loves to poke around in forums and Stack Overflow, from time to time.

Today, whatever I have become is only because of my family, especially my mother, whose perseverance and experience has always been my base.

Sammy Spets has been making Drupal do wild things since 2004, which has been a real pleasure in his life. So much so that Sammy volunteered to be a core maintainer for Drupal 6 and a maintainer of the e-commerce module, which was the commerce module of choice way back when. For the e-commerce module, Sammy made design changes to the payment system, built a few modules to support payment gateways, and added PostgreSQL support among other things.

In 2008, IDG Australia contracted Sammy to design and lead the development of a hybrid Drupal/legacy platform. The platform allowed IDG developers to gradually migrate their websites and web applications over to Drupal 6, which was still in beta. In addition to the platform, Sammy was tasked with creating a module suite for IDG staff to create surveys and report on them. This module suite was built prior to webform and leveraged the power of the Drupal 6 Form API in all its glory. Sammy also trained IDG developers to develop modules and themes in Drupal 6.

Early in 2009, a short contract with Demonz Media in Sydney, Australia brought about some patches to Ubercart, which Demonz gladly contributed back to the community.

Following that, Sammy traveled to Louisville, Kentucky USA where he contributed code to improve the experience for developers extending Ubercart, using its API. Ryan Szrama introduced Sammy to Chick-fil-A and Lyle Mantooth introduced Sammy to Korean food and some amazing fried chicken.

In 2011, Sammy joined the Magicspark team building Drupal sites and maintaining servers. During this time Sammy built a services platform to feed webform data to Marketo and LoopFuse from client Drupal sites via Magicspark's servers. In addition to this, Sammy redeveloped the UI on the "Where to Buy" page of the Redwood Systems website using OpenLayers mapping.

Aside from the geeky stuff, Sammy loves to cook, fine tune recipes, play pool, carve turns on a snowboard, hit the gym, ride motorcycles, fine dine, and drink champagne.