Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Web Sites

reviewed by Mike Swope

REVIEW PROPER

Drupal is a complex PHP Internet-based application developed by an open source community. This means that there are hundreds of contributions to the application that modify or create new functionality in the application. Newbie users will find it nigh impossible to wrap their minds around and encompass all that is Drupal. Where to start? How does this work? Can I do this or add this feature? How do I...? The important thing to remember when starting with Drupal and this book (or any book on such a difficult subject) is to have patience. Readers are learning a new application, with many capabilities not immediately apparent or available. But Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums and Community Web Sites attempts to help readers to understand Drupal's complexity one step at a time.

In most respects, Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Web Sites is much like other computer books. It starts at application requirements and installation and moves toward greater complexity. This book also contains adequate diagrams and screenshots on nearly every page, and adequately covers Drupal's basic concepts, configuration and uses, and touches upon more advanced techniques, including formatting content and altering a site's layout through its template. Unlike most other computer books, however, this book specifically discusses Apache, MySQL, PHP and Drupal installation on Windows, rather than Linux. Also unlike other computer books, this book takes readers thru launching an imaginary community web site as the basis for its lessons. Building this demo site is important. If the reader attempts to skip sections, he or she will be lost, since each concept builds upon preceding concepts. In the end, when readers have set the book down, they will have not only become familiar with the basics of Drupal but also experimented a bit further by creating content types with Flexinode, modifying a template, and prepared to launch a site all on their own.

There isn't any magic bullet when working with Drupal, a difficult application for newbies. Thankfully, books such as David Mercer's Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Web Sites help familiarize newbies with Drupal, and make working with Drupal simpler, more satisfying and less frustrating. Though readers will have more to learn to create the perfect site to meet their needs, Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Web Sites is a primer Drupal newbies will find more than useful.

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