Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, and Community Websites

by David Mercer

Book Overview

A complete guide to every aspect of creating a variety of different websites using Drupal. A trove of well-considered and practical information is presented in a logical and intuitive manner so that... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1904811809
• ISBN13: 9781904811800
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Length: 284 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Drupal 6, David Mercer, Packt

This is a good book to read even if you read Drupal 5 by the same author/publisher. It is a beginning level book but covers the new features nicely. This book assumes you do not know HTML or PHP. The illustrations of the dialog screens are very helpful. There is a very nice one of cpanel and phpMyAdmin although they are not part of Drupal, they can be used for back-ups of your Drupal website. This is a nice book to put on your bookshelf and get down when a problem comes up that needs to be fixed right away.

Easy to Understand Drupal book

This book has been wonderful. It is well versed and easy to understand. It gives the basics on Drupal and I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to set up a Drupal site. I am impressed with the author's ability to break down the basics in easy to understand sections. He takes it one step at a time and makes it easy to copy and initiate each section with lots of illustrations and hints.

Excellant Start

I was really struggling with understanding Drupal before I read this book. This book laid out what I needed to know in a step by step manner that was easy for me to understand. For example, I was having a hard time understanding how I could reference a page of content. How do you know what node number it is anyway? This book explained it to me. There are many more advanced topics that I am sure will come in handy as I use Drupal more.

The Best Text to Date for Beginners

I am an instructor at a small college in central Kansas, and have used this text as a primer for introducing students to the flexibility and power of one of the most popular open-source content management systems available to date. Mercer takes the reader through the step-by-step process needed to install, configure and deploy Drupal effectively. He uses graphic examples of command-line entries which help tremendously for those without a great deal of experience in database creation and administration, and the progression of the chapters walks beginners through all the basics. Once the bare-bones processes are complete, the text turns its attention to some basic customization that really make the book a benefit for the beginner. Those already familiar with Drupal, PHP, Apache, and the rest of the LAMP lineup will most likely not find anything new in this text, but for those investigating Drupal as an open-source CMS solution, it is easily the best in publication. I would have enjoyed a bit more content on other configurations of Drupal, such as CivicSpace, or a bit more on integrating multimedia content modules into a Drupal configuration. With the constantly-growing cache of module additions for the CMS, that could have been a separate book entirely. My students have found the book to be easy-to-read and more importantly, easy-to-reference while working on a project. I will definitely be recommending this as a primary text for our open-source elective courses in the future.

How to use Drupal to your best advantage

Setting up and maintaining a simple website is easy to do with HTML and a little elbow grease. On the other hand, a huge site with hundreds of pages of content is difficult, if not impossible, to do "by hand". Drupal is an open source content management system that many people use to build and maintain medium to large websites. Its task-based modular system makes it very flexible for many types of websites from blogs to business sites. However, mastering the Drupal content management system is not a task that can be accomplished in a few steps. In this book, David Mercer takes you step-by-step as you learn what Drupal has to offer and how to use it to your best advantage. As you would expect, Mercer starts with an introduction to Drupal. Next, he discusses the decisions you make when planning your site and how these decisions determine which Drupal modules you will need. Throughout the book, he uses a fictitious project website as a working example. But before you can get started, you need to download and install Apache, MySQL, PHP and Drupal. Mercer takes you through these steps and then discusses how to solve the most common problems you might encounter. Once that is done, he helps you work on the basic layout and management decisions for your site such as error handling and email setup. Next, he shows you how to increase the functionality of your site by adding several modules for an RSS feed, blog, forum, poll and site search. Moving on to more advanced features, he discusses how to use Drupal to categorize the content on your site and how to manage access (permissions) to your site. Now that the content for your site is completed, you are ready to consider the "look and feel" for your website. Mercer discusses how to start with a basic theme, customize it to your needs and incorporate this with Drupal. Finally, you are ready to move your site onto your host server and set up your database. Mercer also discusses how to use the Drupal administrative interface to facilitate everyday tasks such as backing up your site and scheduling maintenance. David Mercer is a programmer, technical writer and student of Applied Mathematics. Over the past seven years, he has written and collaborated on many books and projects.