I'm really quite astonishingly happy to be joining Tim Hall in co-authoring Python 3 for Absolute Beginners. It's Tim and APress' project, but I've been lucky in getting to author two of the chapters.
The book's aimed at those learning to program, through the medium of Python 3, rather than those already experienced in Python 2.x.
I've never been completely happy with this spindly and slightly confusing diagram from the Django Book, ever since it appeared the first edition.
The book you've all been waiting for, when you've not been waiting for Mark Pilgrim's.
I'm ridiculously excited that the book I co-authored with Tim Hall, Python 3 For Absolute Beginners, has been published. Apress very kindly sent me some complimentary copies last week and I immediately took photos of it and posted them on Flickr.
I blogged about how glad I was to be asked to work alongside Tim on the project back in January, and said among other things:
Panels and panes are like regions and blocks, done properly if a bit madly
When finished this site will implement several different layouts: blogposts, "static" pages, short "nuggets", blog archives, taxonomy listing and probably a bespoke front page. Although these will all have the same underlying seven-column layout, that can still present some problems that are usually solved in Drupal with many different theme files and a lot of "regions" in which you can put "blocks" of content.
Views, tabs and menus generally shouldn't be this hard, but here's how to get a multi-tabbed view working.
Drupal's menu hierarchy is a big and complex beast. It acts as both the repository for registered menu callback handlers (and their associated permissions handlers) and as a way of building more mundane frontend menus for people to click round. It serves both static hierarchical side menus and also dynamic tabbed contextual menus: if you're on a user's profile page, there are "View" and "Edit" tabs, with "Account" and maybe "Profile" sub-tabs under "Edit"; yet this menu hierarchy doesn't exist in any real sense.
Between Views and custom code is a no-man's land. Here's how to pick your way through it.
Every content management system needs its query builder—an application which creates customizable lists of content elements and present them in a similarly customisable way. Customization will be typically through an admin interface on the website, and the query builder can be as basic as a text box for SQL or as complex as a many-layered GUI across multiple webpages. Drupal, for its part, has Views. D5 has Views 1, D6 has Views 2, and it looks like the forthcoming Drupal 7 will have Views 3.
