Drupal is changing the way we create a feature and content-rich website. When I created my first web-based Content Management System (CMS) website in Drupal, I was amazed at the power of the Drupal CMS system. It allows me to rapidly create a high quality web application in a short period of time without sacrificing the application functionality.

Drupal is not only an open source CMS, but is also a web application development framework. The extensible and flexible architecture of Drupal can be used for any size of business including freelancers, agencies, governments, universities, and enterprises. The White House, Digg, Fast Company, Sony Music, McDonald's, and Stanford University are all using Drupal for their sites.

One of the most important milestones in Drupal was the Content Construction Kit (CCK). Most of this module has been integrated into Drupal 7 core. It is now called Field API. So when you install Drupal 7, it will come with this powerful module in core, and you can start to create custom fields for your site without downloading an extra module.

The Field API module is not just the CCK module moved to the Drupal core. It has been completely rewritten and redesigned in Drupal 7. It has been optimized to run faster and work more efficiently. It provides you with more field type options, and it has given you more flexible options to allow you to create custom fields not only for content types, but also for comments, taxonomy, and more, that was not possible to achieve before Drupal 7. After reading this book, you will learn how the new Fields API module works, and understand the concept of fields and how to implement them.

In this book, we will use Drupal 7 fields to build a fictional website from scratch. We will explore the power of fields within Drupal 7, then you can apply these techniques to your own projects.