Customer Reviews

Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions

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I've just read Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions by Mark Noble and think it's got a lot of good things going on. This book, like a lot of Drupal books out there, presents some basic methods for installing and setting up a Drupal website but what it does differently is look at every tutorial and example through the lens of a small business.

In fact, the whole book is tutorial after tutorial of setting up Drupal with this same small business in mind. The example business is described as a restaurant with a well known chef, with specific clientele, particular menu, etc. The whole book is a great example in assessing the needs of this business and then working out Drupal solutions to get there. Granted, I don't know think there are many famous chefs are out there building their own websites, but this is besides the point.

I've got a background in technology training, including training for Drupal, and I am definitely sensitive to the prospective reader's learning needs. Technical books can sometimes advertise themselves to the wrong audience and leave some new learners in the dust. But I'm happy to say that this one passes my learner sensors without any difficult issues.

Like a lot of the books coming from Packt Publishing, the preface lays down some assumptions on who the book is intended to help and what tools readers will need to follow along at home. The author's got a pretty good workflow for configuring a newly installed Drupal website, and moves from basic to advanced at a appropriate pace. The path through the Drupal principles is, for the most part, clear and well designed. The lessons were concise and easy to grasp.

There were only a few parts where I though some principles were presented out of order, like right in Chapter 2 there is a small segment on installing and enabling new modules smack in the middle of a bigger section on creating pages. But these diversions aren't terribly distracting and do manage to inform the task at hand for first time readers.

Some of the chapters and topics don't get the depth that they deserve and have the chance to leave a reader stranded. Chapter 9, for example, deals with the ecommerce package known as Ubercart, but is very seriously abbreviated. This topic, and ecommerce in general, is one that probably requires a whole additional book to fully teach and grasp and there is at least one Drupal ecommerce book on the market right now.

All told, the book reads just as advertised and makes good on its promise of "building powerful web site features for your business." If anyone is looking for a book with great practical examples and very accessible scenarios, then this would be my recommendation.

Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions by Mark Noble

This is another book in the Packt Publishing series on using Drupal. To quote from the back cover ... "This book is designed primarily for business owners who want to create a new web site for their company or upgrade an existing company web site to make it easier to maintain and have advanced capabilities."

I really like "cookbook" examples for technical subjects - show me how to build something useful by way of good examples and I will figure out how to modify the recipe to be what I want. Well not only does this book do that very well but it is almost really a cookbook -- the example used for the whole book is a chef run restaurant!

One thing notable about this book is the number of add-on modules explored during the building of this web site. In addition to the expected CCK and Views there are lots of non-core modules that are used in the example chapters.

This book is an overview that doesn't spend much of it's time on the low level details. It does a good job showing off important functionality that is freely available to use and pretty easy to configure. This will get your web site up and running quickly.

Chapter One is your basic install Drupal but by Chapter 2 you are adding new functionality by creating an image gallery using a variety of optional functionality.

Chapter 3 -- we start to create a product / service listing -- in this case the restaurants menu that provides a good online experience that is easy to maintain.

In chapter 4 we move to interacting with customers and visitors - setting up users, comments, ratings, polls and surveys.

Chapter 5 moves to using and consuming blogs. How to setup and moderate multiple blogs for your staff and then bring content from other web sites into your site as added value.

Chapter 6 takes us to creating an online / email newsletter and an events calendar.

Chapters 7 & 8 move to integrating external data from YouTube, Flickr and Google Maps to provide the "web 2.0" experience we all expect and then how to include download able content for your site visitors.

Chapter 9 goes way out there and adds online ordering and payment to our restaurant web site using the ubercart family of modules ..... pre paid takeout!!

The rest of the book is devoted to the behind the scenes of keeping the site working and how to find good resources to help give the site the finished professional look you may not be able to get to on your own.

The next step would be to dig into Drupal Theming http://www.packtpub.com/drupal-6-themes/ and / or Drupal Module Development http://www.packtpub.com/drupal-6-module-development both of which go well beyond the basic configuration skills required for this book.

The author has decided to cover a lot of material in this book by providing a good overview of functionality. But the trade off is cover half of the material or use twice the pages to cover the material more in depth.

Overall I find this book another useful addition to the Drupal universe. No one book will make you a Drupal expert but having a good variety of books available makes getting there easier.

I am in the process of making a new site for someone with a nice looking, but aging site that was built on Drupal 4.7, which is no longer supported. I am looking through the site's functionality and theme and have upgraded both to use Drupal 5, but only to be sure that it has current security updates while I make plans with the owner for a complete redesign.

While researching ideas and functionality to present for use in the new site, I ran across a brand new book from Packt Press called Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions that I found enjoyable, and very useful. Now, I already know what I am doing with Drupal. I know how to read the project's documentation to find and configure modules and themes, and I know how to get help if I need it. Even so, this book gave me some great ideas that I am going to share with the owner of the site I am working on and that I hope to use.

The entire book centers around creating a website for a fictional company, The Good Eatin' Bistro. You start out with a discussion of the basic needs for the company, then begin with the basics of creating a site suitable to the customer's needs. As the book progresses, you learn how to use some well-known and some other less-known modules to add interesting and useful functionality to the site that makes information easy to find and interesting to view.

Do you want a site that allows all members of a project you are involved in to have individual blogs, with a calendar to display events, and a map? No problem. Have a restaruant and want to put your menu online in a way that looks good, and is easily changed. Easy. Are you interested in creating a newsletter that people viewing your site can sign up to recieve occasionally? You can. All this and a ton more are in the book.

I think one of the most useful parts of the book for most people will be the last chapter, which talks about how to find out how to add functionality not discussed in the book, where to get help, and has some great tips on things that not everyone thinks about like hosting, hardware, and working with developers and artists.

One thing that crossed my mind is sharing the book with the owner of the site I mentioned. He won't understand the technical details, but this book is written in a way that I believe will make what I am doing very clear and make it much easier for him to talk with me about his hopes, plans and desires. For that reason alone, the book is valuable to me, and it might be to others as well who are not actually interested in creating a site themselves, but who need to know enough detail to be able to discuss site building intelligently with a developer, designer or team of people working to create a site for them.

The book does not cover theming, but focuses solely on enabling features, enabling and configuring new functionality to a site built on Drupal 6. If you are interested in theming Drupal 6, there is another book by Packt that discusses that topic in detail, as well as several other good ones out there.

I purchased this book as a beginning guide to Drupal. I began with opening the book and systematically following along trying to duplicate what the author had written. It became very obvious early on that the author does not document every step, skips steps, and refers to features and functions with little or no explanation how to accomplish them. Some of the missing steps and instructions can be puzzled out by the context and reference of the chapter. Other sections left me totally confused. The author also has a bad habit of telling you what to do, then going through a step by step approach to accomplishing it. If you want me to follow along, tell me the steps in the same paragraph or at least on the same page. Most of these errors should have been caught by the technical reviewer or editor, who obviously did a cursory job at best on this edition. Given some careful review by a meticulous and experienced editor, this would be an excellent resource. As is, it is only mediocre.

I've been putzing with Drupal for a few months and have even developed custom modules. So I already knew much of what was in this book anyway.

But I bought this book anyway, and I sure wish I had it when I first started working with the software. It's a great overview of Drupal and many of the more popular contributed modules. It doesn't go into great depth on any particular subject, but it shows you how to add a LOT of functionality to a website quickly and easily, which is what makes Drupal such an attractive product to begin with.

A great book, perfectly matched to its subject matter.

I am not exactly a newbie to Drupal, nor am I a pro, so in general I found this book helpful in advancing my Drupal skills. The book introduces modules that are essential to any moderately robust drupal site. A good sampling. What is frustrating about the book is the rather poor attention to detail, and method. One gets the sense that this was narrated and then transcribed because there is the occasional "Oh, did I mention this?" kind of feel. For example, when discussing usage of the date module, instead of explaining the module, its purpose and usage at the beginning of the discussion, the date module is introduced as a step in the exercise in which it is used. I am a professional at technical writing, and so for me this aspect of the book leaves me frustrated. It needs a good editor. But, if you're patient, the book can be quite helpful.