Model Your Data with Drupal

Drupal seems awesome, but what do you do when your data doesn’t seem to match its idea of “content?”

Drupal is supposed to be one of the best content management systems on the web but sometimes it feels more like a dead end than the road to a great website.

Drupal is supposed to have great built in content types, right?

Drupal’s built in content types are great when you make general assumption about your content. But what happens when you have certain objects that aren’t ever publicly accessible? Or have 100+ fields or properties? Or when the workflow is more than “Published” and “Unpublished?”

You probably already have data for your site, or your client has workflow needs, but trying to design your site fit the idea of ‘Articles,’ ‘Pages,’ and ‘Blog posts’ isn’t going to meet your needs. It’s the proverbial square peg in a round hole all over again.

Sure, you might be able to find some modules that provide that functionality, but you never know when you’ll get…

The inevitable “Can we just change the way that X works?” phone call:

Everything goes great at first, saving content, creating menus, adding some blocks, etc. But then it happens: you’re client asks you to change the workflow a little bit here, add some different fields over there, and build some custom queries to link their data together.

It’s not an unreasonable request at all, but soon you find yourself cursing at Drupal as you override built in functionality, and trying to hack on custom code to handle those things that you thought Drupal could do out of the box.

What happened to my fast, snappy Drupal site? (or Why is my site so @%#ing slow?)

Drupal is well known for its ability to scale to enormous sites, but that won’t help you if your site is bogged down with hundreds or even (gasp!) thousands of fields on it’s content types.

Then there’s the issue of complicated node access modules that you enabled to protect a few pieces of ‘private’ content, which end up slowing down every single query for every other piece of content on your website.

What if you could model your data and workflow in Drupal without giving yourself a headache?

Imagine being able to sort out your data into the appropriate object to represent it without making any compromises. That means providing simple structures, database tables and code where you can express exactly what you want without dealing with default behaviors to override.

You’ll be able to meet whatever needs your clients have without ever saying, “Drupal isn’t designed to work that way.” You won’t have to spend hours trying out contributed modules just to find that none of them works the way you need things done.

Decisions about access control and additional features won’t make you lose sleep at night worrying about your sites’ performance. No more hitting your desk in frustration while trying to figure out how to disable features you don’t need.

Model Your Data with Drupal is a simple book with one goal: To help you represent your data inside Drupal without compromise.

Hands on examples with lots of code samples show you how to build your own workflow and entities without sacrificing integration with Drupal where it matters. You’ll be able to connect your custom entities and database structure with the Views module, menu system, Fields API, user/permissions systems and more.

Go from slow to pro with easy to follow examples. If there’s more than one way to solve a given problem, we’ll show you the tradeoffs of each approach.

Learn when to leverage Drupal’s built in content management features and when to define your own entities. It’s time to take control of your Drupal data.

Intrigued? Get on the list at http://modelyourdatawithdrupal.com/ for chapter release updates, discounts, and a direct line to me for questions and Drupal data issues.