| | |  | Software Engineering | Home » » » Using Drupal | | | | | | | Description: | | With the recipes in this book, you can take full advantage of the vast collection of community-contributed modules that make the Drupal web framework useful and unique. You'll get the information you need about how to combine modules in interesting ways (with a minimum of code-wrangling) to develop a variety of community-driven websites. Each chapter describes a case study and outlines specific requirements for one of several projects included in the book -- a wiki, publishing workflow site, photo gallery, product review site, online store, user group site, and more. With Using Drupal, you will: - Get an overview of Drupal concepts and key modules introduced in each chapter, with a bird's-eye view of each module's specialty and how it works
- Explore various solutions within Drupal that meet the requirements for the project, with details about which modules are selected and why
- Learn how to configure modules, with step-by-step recipes for building the precise functionality the project requires
- Get information on additional modules that will make the project even more powerful
- Be able to access the modules used in the chapter, along with other resources
Newcomers will find a thorough introduction to the framework, while experienced Drupal developers will learn best practices for building powerful websites. With Using Drupal, you'll find concrete and creative solutions for developing the exact community website you have in mind.
| | | Features: | |
• ISBN13: 9780596515805
• Condition: New
• Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Angela Byron | | Paperback:
| 496 pages | | Publisher:
| O'Reilly Media | | Publication Date:
| December 23, 2008 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 0596515804 | | Product Length:
| 7.0 inches | | Product Width:
| 9.1 inches | | Product Height:
| 1.1 inches | | Product Weight:
| 1.75 pounds | | Package Length:
| 10.5 inches | | Package Width:
| 7.9 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.3 inches | | Package Weight:
| 1.45 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 48 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
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82 of 83 found the following review helpful:
 THE book for any new or intermediate Drupal userDec 17, 2008
By Stephanie Pakrul
"Drupal theming guru/bellydancer/paleo eater"
This book has been eagerly awaited as the first O'Reilly volume covering Drupal, and having been written by such a rockstar team of Drupal pros.
It's also the first book to focus on a wide range of third party contributed modules rather than just Drupal core, or a narrow subject area of modules. It's written for Drupal 6, although the book would be fairly applicable to Drupal 5 (with the caveat that one of the major modules, Views, is completely different for Drupal 6 - the underlying concepts are similar though).
The first thing that struck me about this book is its fundamentally different approach from most early Drupal books, as well as the kinds of books you find in the early stages of any new technology's mainstream acceptance. It's not simply a higher quality rehashing of handbook pages and technical how-tos, but it has an incredibly cohesive and clever process through the entire book.
Every main chapter of the book will:
* Introduce an example scenario that's easy to relate to. For example, an early chapter that covers creating a simple site for a Mom & Pop shop has this sample case study: "in order to update the web page content each week, they currently pay their next-door neighbor Goldie to hand-edit the page"
* Outline what you're going to be building
* Explain why certain decisions or trade-offs were made when creating this site, and highlight alternative choices depending on your particular situation
* Explains step-by-step how to complete the site with lots of tables and screenshots, pointing out gotchas and important concepts along the way
* Ends with a "Taking It Further" section with suggestions for other features or future modules to watch that are related to the site recipe
The hands-on approach of this book takes you through a single, cohesive example in each chapter. This gets you building a site to completion at every step. This approach reminds me of the different ways to learn a musical instrument such as piano or guitar - you can start with theory and technique and practice your scales first, or you can just learn some chords and be able to whip out a few simple pop songs your first afternoon. This book is the chords.
It also has some great moments of explaining fuzzy concepts that are difficult to understand without significant Drupal experience. The Using Drupal team shows their years of expertise training users and implementing Drupal sites in gems such as this, describing whether you should use taxonomy or a CCK field for content categorization:
A general rule of thumb is that if you can remove the field and the content type still makes sense, use Taxonomy. An article filed under a "Technology" category is still an article if you remove the category association, so Taxonomy is a good fit. If the field is part of a piece of content, such as an album's recording artist, then CCK is generally a better choice.
Using Drupal will take you through building a:
* Simple website with blog for a mom & pop grocery store, including a WYSIWYG editor and uploading images to content
* Job posting board for a university, which introduces the key CCK and Views modules
* Product reviews site with user ratings, Amazon product data importing, some simple CSS tweaks using the CSS Injector module, and more CCK/Views
* Wiki, which brings in revisions, input formats, and Pathauto module
* Local arts news site, which takes you into Actions, Triggers, Workspace, Workflow (both as a concept and module), and Views Bulk Operations to create an administration page
* Photo gallery, with ImageField, ImageCache, much more Views and some site display tweaks
* Multilingual website with a strong overview of concepts, then Locale, i18n, and the Localization Client
* Event management site with calendar and attendees
* Online store using Ubercart (focuses on basic store setup, products, attributes, and orders - you'll still need to set up payment methods)
It also covers a few additional topics:
* An overview of Drupal, and where to get help
* Basic theming (this is the only time you'll see code!)
* Installing and upgrading Drupal and modules
* How to choose modules and participate in the community
So what's it missing?
Obviously Using Drupal only scratches the surface of the many, many types of sites you can build with Drupal. There are a few major topics you won't find covered in here - membership sites with protected user access, Organic Groups (a chapter that didn't quite make it due to module readiness for D6), more advanced magazine/newspaper-style sites with modules like Node Queue and Panels, multimedia (there's another book for that!), or social networking sites. However, I think they picked a great selection of site recipes to cover in a relatively small amount of space, and each recipe will get you a solid site built.
The book will also direct you to two additional resources available online: the finished demo site for each chapter for you to browse, and a download package containing installation profiles with the same versions of modules and themes used on each site. The installation profiles will set you up with a clean slate with your modules all prepared for you to start following along step-by-step in each chapter.
Other things I really love about this book:
* It isn't afraid to recommend helpful modules early, such as Administration Menu
* It highlights common newbie gotchas, such as using the blog module when you really want a story
* It points out future modules or alternatives to watch, for example, the WYSIWYG API
* It gives contrib modules such as CCK and Views the foregrounding they deserve when learning Drupal
This is the book I wish I had when learning Drupal. We're even giving away copies of it at [...] because we love it so much. I would recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone new to Drupal, intermediate users who want to take their skills to the next level or brush up on Drupal 6/Views 2, or anyone who actually needs to build a site similar to the recipes listed above. And, y'know, anyone else who's ever built or wanted to build a website :)
36 of 38 found the following review helpful:
This should be everyone's second Drupal bookDec 22, 2008
By C. Durand
I'm just learning Drupal and this book has been invaluable. Via a "case study" approach, Using Drupal shows you many well-trodden paths through the Drupal forest using off-the-shelf modules to build out 9 sites.
As a Drupal newcomer comfortable writing code (like me), your first instinct will probably be to start adding PHP to your theme, your blocks, etc. to do what you want. Using Drupal shows you how other developers have solved many common problems/features and packaged up the solutions as modules. It's like being able to start out on your first solo project after being on a team that has already completed 9 Drupal projects. You'll already have a set of "tried and true" design patterns to leverage and know how Drupal sites tend to be built.
Using Drupal can only cover a handful of the numerous Drupal modules out there, but it saves you time by pointing out some of the most useful and commonly-used modules and showing you how to use them in practical situations.
This book is not a comprehensive introduction to the basics (how to install Drupal, basic configuration, etc.), but once you have the basics and want to start "Using Drupal" on real projects, this should be your next read.
16 of 16 found the following review helpful:
 Great for contributed modulesFeb 13, 2009
By Dean Myerson
This is one of many books coming out that focuses on the very confusing contributed modules aspect of Drupal. There are so many and it's hard to know what's available, and what choices to make. The book has a focus on some of the most popular ones, like CCK and Views, but covers many others as well. I particularly like that it often compares the options available for doing a specific thing and explains why they chose the one they did, and why you might choose another one.
I gave the book four stars instead of five because the printed edition needed some serious proofing. If you get the printed edition, be sure to go to the website where you can find errata (corrections). It was very confusing and time-consuming to figure out that figures were out of sync with the figure references in the text in some cases. There were also some typos that make some instructions technically wrong. But given how much people wanted to get this book, maybe they rushed it.
10 of 10 found the following review helpful:
Very good - even for beginnersMay 03, 2009
By fivestringer
I'm a rank amateur when it comes to Drupal. I'm not even proficient with HTML. Stylesheets? What are those?
I do have a hosted domain, and I wanted a good looking web presence, but didn't want to pay someone to create and maintain my web site (I'm semi-retired and don't want to spend the money). I briefly looked at Joomla, but it appeared too restrictive and not that easy to learn. I decided to give Drupal a spin.
Not that Drupal is easy to learn by any stretch. Drupal's many, many options, along with the ever-increasing cadre of third-party developers, gives virtually unlimited customization opportunities.
I have been looking for a good Drupal manual for a while, and "Using Drupal" is the best I've run across. Not that I've been able to find many at all.
This book is good in that you can pick it up and get started without having to know anything about Drupal. The book is centered around developing several different types of web sites, which is absolutely fantastic if you happen to be developing a similar type web site.
But even if you aren't I think it's a really good book. It introduces you to underlying concepts of Drupal, as well as relaying great information on several of the more popular third-party modules.
I decided that I was going to read the book from cover to cover before going back to my computer and trying to implement some of the concepts. I'm glad I did - even if you run across something that seems directly applicable to what you (think) you want to do, they probably present at least one alternative elsewhere.
All in all it's a good Drupal book. I'm glad I bought it and I'm sure I'll be going back to it for tips and hints frequently.
13 of 14 found the following review helpful:
This is the Drupal book I've been waiting forJan 21, 2009
By Michael McKee
"mystic cowboy"
Drupal is an incredibly powerful CMS and like anything with its flexibility, Drupal quickly gets complicated. As much as I like the system, one of the problems that I've had with it is that Drupal has been built upon a unique set of assumptions/principles, which really haven't been covered in a book. Until now.
This is the missing link between the introductory Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6: Build your own professional blog, forum, portal or community website with Drupal 6, which does a nice job of getting a basic Drupal site set up but doesn't really show how to deeply customize the CMS, and Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition (Beginning from Novice to Professional), which is written for programmers. Both are good for what they are, but don't help the reasonably knowledgeable web designer, not programmer, wring all the juicy goodness out of Drupal.
Through a series of well chosen example projects, Using Drupal, opens the door to the power and extensibility of Drupal and shows us not just how to do things but why. It's the why part that makes this book special. Drupal is different and understanding the philosophy behind the difference and how to think the Drupal way makes Drupal special.
Even though I've built a dozen working Drupal sites over the last few years, a couple pretty complex and customized, I've felt that there was more I could be getting from the system. Oh, I can theme a site and set up users and modules. I could add custom forms and views, which my clients thought was great, but I always felt that here was something I wasn't quite grasping. No longer.
Besides getting a ton of practical advice from well chosen and explained examples, Using Drupal has given me the key to thinking understanding the system. Brilliant.
The authors could only cover a few of the many, many possible modules that extend Drupal. The ones they did cover are really useful, though, and form the core of most customization. What's great, if I may repeat myself, is that they way these add-ons are used and described teach Drupal principles, making this more than a cookbook.
The single best source of Drupal information on the web is the site lullabot.com. It comes as no surprise that the authors of this book are the development team that puts out Lullabot.
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