D7 Views Cookbook released

There was a time not too long ago that I thought this book would never make it to the shelves. The original idea was to have the release date coincide with Drupal 7. So what happened?

I started writing it when Drupal 7 was in Alpha 1. Moving from alpha to alpha, there was no update mechanism...in particular none for the database, so I would have to recreate content, content types, etc. Then Drupal 7 was late... way late, and many of the standard features didn't work until just before release, so much of the book had holes. Finally D7 came out, and I waited...and waited...and waited for Views to follow, because there were also many things in Views that were not working then, including many of the views included with the module.

Then, I was chatting with Merlinofchaos, and he mentioned that the Views UI was going to have a new release, and pointed me to screen shots on Drupal Garden. Keep in mind that at this point, other than the holes in the manuscript caused by certain Views functionality not working, I had finished the first draft. The screen shots revealed what we all can see now: given that the 'recipes' in the book give step by step instructions of what to do in the UI to create each view, all the recipes would need to be rewritten, because the UI was that different.

So, I went off and started rewriting the book. Somewhere around the middle of Chapter 3, the new Views module was released in alpha. There were actually several differences between the released UI and the screen shots, as well as ambiguities in the screen shots that were resolved with the code being released, but that were resolved differently than I had assumed. So, once I finished the second first draft, I had to go back and redo much of Chapters 1-3.

Anyway, lesson learned about writing a How-to before the software is ready! The book can be read about and ordered here. If you are interested in reviewing the book, please contact Vishal Tiwari (vishalt@packtpub.com), as he has limited free e-book copies available for reviewers.

Of course, the Drupal Community isn't the only place to give back. It's a complex world, and there are as many worthy causes as their are melodies, with most being served by multiple charitable organizations. Here are a few of those that strike a 7th chord with me.