drupalib A place for library drupallers to hang out

[Originally posted 2008-08-12, edited and expanded 2008-08-13]

This new module, released on Aug. 8, looks like it has potential as a lightweight ILS. It allows site admins to define content types for books and other circulating physical material, to define copies of the books (called 'items'), and to define simple borrower records. Here's a late-night walkthrough of how this module works.

Drupal in Libraries (Library Technology Reports 44:4, May/June 2008) by Andy Austin and Christopher Harris is a valuable overview of Drupal for a library audience. The 37-page issue is approachable and organized well, and provides enough detail to interest potential Drupal implementers while not overloading them with jargon or highly technical explanations of Content Management Systems or Drupal's architecture.

Learning Drupal 6 Module Development by Matt Butcher is a useful counterpart to Pro Drupal Development (PDD) in two ways -- it updates some of the content in PDD (which covers Drupal 5.x) and it focuses on some topics not covered in sufficient detail in the earlier, and intentionally more general, book, such as AJAX/JSON, in-module theming, and installation profiles.

Pro Drupal Development, by John VanDyk and Matt Westgate (Apress, 2007) is the first book aimed specifically at Drupal developers.