Preface

Thank you for choosing this book. Digital experience is the broad set of ways users can engage through a website, online shopping, apps, and more. Drupal is an open source digital framework used to create digital experiences. Incepted as a content management system built on structured content models, Drupal’s flexibility, extensibility, and evolution has positioned Drupal to serve the broader digital space. Drupal’s interoperability allows it to work with other things like social media networks, CRM systems, technical capabilities, apps, and even internet-of-things connected devices. Drupal is known for its configuration layer that enables no-code modification through an administrative user interface. The extensibility allows Drupal to be customized both functionally and visually through a robust development framework that often appeals to enterprise use cases. The community maintains both the core of Drupal and a large series of modular projects that can be readily installed, if desired for a given installation.

There are many books on Drupal, several of which dive deep in a specific way. This doesn’t reflect the experience I’ve had with Drupal, in which I have been asked to solve a large number of problems that have spanned every aspect of Drupal that have spanned various Drupal agencies and companies that build products supporting Drupal applications. My experience covers:

• Participating in the community
• Installing Drupal
• Evaluating/installing Drupal projects
• Configuring features
• Writing code through modules and themes
• Deploying updates
• Running/configuring Drupal’s technology stack
• Dependent and complementary technologies
• Broader DevOps implementations, and more

Drupal continues to be one of the longest standing and largest open source communities. Community members are often in high demand to help companies advise, build, maintain, or upgrade Drupal. Drupal affords continuous opportunities to learn through its community, which is always at the ready to help find important work, coach new community members, and ultimately, help members grow as technologists.