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Packt is pleased to announce the release of WordPress Themes Design, which is a complete guide to creating professional WordPress themes. Written by Tessa Blakeley Silver, this book will be invaluable to WordPress users or visual designers who want to develop a WordPress theme. WordPress is an open-source blog engine released under the GNU general public license. It allows users to easily create dynamic blogs with great content and many outstanding features. It is an ideal tool for developing blogs and though it is chiefly used for blogging, it can also be used as a complete CMS with very little effort. Its versatility and ease of use has attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users. This book walks through clear, step-by-step instructions to build a custom theme for the WordPress open-source blog engine. The author provides design tips and suggestions and covers setting up the WordPress sandbox, and reviews the best practices from setting up the theme's template structure, through coding markup, testing, and debugging, to taking it live. The last three chapters cover additional tips, tricks, and various cookbook recipes for adding popular site enhancements to WordPress theme designs using 3rd-party plugins as well as creating API hooks to add custom plugins. Whether users are working with a pre-existing theme or creating a new one from the ground up, WordPress Theme Design will give them the know-how to effectively understand how themes work within the WordPress blog system enabling them to have full control over their site's design and branding. Users only need to be comfortable with the basics of web development and this book will take care of the rest. For more details on the book please visit the webpage of the book.

A new book that teaches users how to create themes for Drupal websites has been announced today by Packt Publishing. Written by prominent open source and Content Management expert Ric Shreves, ‘Drupal 5 Themes’ helps readers create striking new looks for their Drupal websites. Drupal is an award winning open source Content Management System, finishing as the overall winner in the 2007 Open Source Content Management System Award. Based on PHP/MySQL, its power and flexibility combined with exceptional design, means it is already on the way to becoming the de facto standard for CMS websites. Drupal’s modular design and structured source code make it both highly flexible and easily extended and modified. Drupal is extremely scalable, making it ideal for both a simple personal website as well as an industrial strength commercial or institutional web presence. Creating eye-catching and professional themes for Drupal websites can be a daunting task for developers and designers. However with prior knowledge of HTML, CSS, and a dash of creativity, this book will simplify the process by explaining the Drupal theming architecture, the PHPTemplate engine, and also how to modify existing themes and build new themes from scratch. “One of the things I set out to accomplish with this book, was to create a resource” explains author, Ric Shreves. “In the book, I put together a catalog of the system's 20+ stylesheets and all the default themeable functions. The information is organized logically and will make this a resource people can put on their shelf and turn to when needed. Being able to quickly lay your hands on the information concerning the styles and the themeable functions is a real time-saver,” he concludes. As an open source project, Drupal is free to download. This means that it survives through volunteers and donations from an enthusiastic community. In a move designed to demonstrate their support and to help provide a source of revenue for the project, Packt is paying the Drupal Foundation a percentage of every book sold. “This is something we do for all open source projects that we publish books on” explains Packt spokesman Damian Carvill. “Our aim is to establish our royalties as part of the service and support business model that sustains Open Source.” Published in December, 2007, this book will be suitable for anyone who wants to learn more about Drupal themes and for designers of all levels who are trying to get their heads around working with Drupal. For more information, please visit Packt’s website at www.packtpub.com

Following the latest release of Drupal 6 in February 2008, Packt Publishing is pleased to announce an update to David Mercer’s best selling Drupal 4.7 book. Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6 is as much of an overhaul of the original book as Drupal 6 is over Drupal 4.7. Drupal is a hugely popular and widely celebrated open-source Content Management System that is day-by-day becoming the first choice of people for building blogs and other websites. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Hillary Clinton, and many others utilize Drupal to fulfil their online requirements. The updated book meets the booming demand for well presented, clear, concise, and above all practical information on how to move from establishing the need for a website all the way through to designing and building it like a pro, and finally successfully managing and maintaining it. Experienced technical author David Mercer expertly guides the reader through all the stages of building a professional website in a plain, articulate manner. “This book, like its predecessor, is still aimed at predominantly beginners, although I suspect many intermediate users of Drupal will find it useful too” explains Mercer. “In comparison to the first book, this update provides a steeper launching ramp to the more technical and professional aspects of Drupal.” Written in the same style as the original Drupal title, this book is a pragmatic look at the steps necessary to get a website up and running. Drawing on years of writing experience, David Mercer utilizes a friendly, engaging style that is both clear and concise – perfect for the Drupal newbie. For more information please visit the webpage of the book.

Learning Drupal 6 Module Development is a new book from Packt, which acts as a practical tutorial for creating Drupal 6 modules with PHP. Written by Matt Butcher, this book will help users to walk through the development of complete Drupal 6 Modules. Drupal is a free and open-source modular web application framework and content management system (CMS) written in PHP. It can run in many environments, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD. It's a modular system, with an elegant hook-based architecture, and great code. These are a few of the perks that make Drupal a choice platform for developers who want the power of an established CMS, but the freedom to make it work for them. From social networking to AJAX to e-commerce, the hundreds of existing modules attest to Drupal's flexibility. If users are eager to start creating modules for Drupal 6, this is their book. They will walk through the development of complete Drupal modules with this primer for PHP programmers. Specifically written for Drupal 6, this book will get users coding modules as quickly as possible, and help them add the features that will give their work that professional gloss! This book will give users a clear, concise and, of course, practical guidance to take them from the basics of creating their first module to developing the skills to make them a Drupal developer to be reckoned with. Learning Drupal 6 Module Development covers the new and updated APIs to guide their transition to Drupal 6. The new menu system, the Forms and Schema APIs, and many core revisions are covered in this book. This book is written for PHP developers who want to add custom features to Drupal. Users will need to know the basics of PHP and MySQL programming, but no experience of programming Drupal is required, although they will be expected to be familiar with the basic operation of Drupal. For more details on the book please visit Learning Drupal 6 Module Development .

Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce is a new book from Packt which will help users to sell online using the award-winning open-source Drupal web application. Written by Michael Peacock, this book provides the essentials of getting an e-commerce website up and running with Drupal. Drupal is a free and open-source modular web application framework and content management system (CMS) written in PHP that can run in many environments; including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD. Drupal e-Commerce is a free, open-source, feature-rich, flexible package of modules that seamlessly adds full e-Store capabilities to Drupal. Drupal e-Commerce is the combination of Drupal, the award-winning Drupal 5 content management system and the e-Commerce package of modules that can be plugged into it, bringing a wealth of e-commerce functionality to the software. In this book users will learn how to use the Drupal Content Management System along with its e-Commerce modules to set up and manage an online shop. Users will learn to install the software, take a look at its features, plan and create their shop, look at customer management, create a design for their shop, and cover security, taxes, shipping, and even marketing their business! The book starts with the basics of Drupal and then takes the users through the creation of an online shop, exploring Drupal further as needed. Only the features of Drupal relevant to the e-commerce application will be covered. This book is for people who want to start selling online as quickly as possible, and want to see how to use the proven Drupal platform to achieve this. The book is ideal for use in a small business with only basic in-house technical skills. It will also be useful for developers who not only want to create an e-commerce site but also want a CMS platform for expanding the site in the future. No prior knowledge of Drupal is required. No PHP experience is expected, although it will be useful. Basic knowledge of e-commerce will be useful, although the main concepts are introduced and covered as required. For more details on the book please visit http://www.packtpub.com/drupal-ecommerce/book.