Web developers, both freelance and enterprise, who are looking to build Web sites using open-source tools that run on Windows will find this book helpful. It provides an in-depth look at creating Web sites using the Drupal 7 content management system on the Windows platform.

This book is not intended as an introduction to Web development. Readers who are unfamiliar with the concepts of Web servers, databases, and programming languages may find the examples in the book hard to follow. Rather, the book provides an overview of a particular development platform running on a particular operating system.

The author presents the topic in a casual and often humorous style; his sense of sarcasm is frequently evident. The technical content is presented in a clear and unambiguous fashion, and includes numerous code listings and screen shots.

The book is divided into three parts, covering the basics of Drupal and its supporting technologies, the development of custom modules and themes, and the interfaces for database integration and module deployment. The flow from part to part takes readers into gradually more advanced material as they progress through the book.

Part 1 comprises chapters 1 through 4. Chapter 1 provides an overview of content management systems in general, and places Drupal in the context of other commercial and open-source solutions. Chapter 2 details the life cycle of a page in the Drupal system, from request to response. Chapter 3 provides the syntax for basic programming operations in PHP, along with some functions that are unique to Drupal, and a brief discussion of MySQL. Chapter 4 closes the first part of the book by providing instructions for installing and configuring Drupal 7 in Windows.

Part 2 focuses on module and theme development in Drupal by walking the user through the creation of a weather information module, and includes chapters 5 through 8. Chapter 5 provides an overview of module development, and chapter 6 goes into more detail regarding content types and user permissions within a module. Chapter 7 covers the development of custom themes and customizing already-present themes. Chapter 8 discusses testing, and introduces the new testing framework in Drupal 7.

Chapters 9 and 10 make up Part 3, although they are only tangentially related. Chapter 9 covers accessing the database using the database abstraction layer, and chapter 10 discusses the creation of installation and deployment functionality for custom modules.

Readers who are looking for guidance in developing Web sites using Drupal 7 on a full Microsoft-based Web server stack may find themselves disappointed. Rather than fully moving away from the Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP) stack, the book only replaces Linux with Windows (a Windows, Apache, MySQL, and Perl/PHP/Python (WAMP) stack). For a fully Microsoft-based experience, developing Drupal 7 Web sites using Visual Studio (via a $100 plug-in, VS.php) and hosting them on an Internet Information Services (IIS) and SQL server stack, a brief appendix provides some instruction. At the time of the book’s publication, however, the integration of Drupal with these tool sets was anything but robust.

Overall, this book gives an excellent introduction and an in-depth tutorial for developing Drupal Web sites with custom themes and modules. For Windows developers who are looking to implement an open-source content management solution, or any Drupal developers who are looking to extend their solutions to the Windows platform, this is an excellent book.