Customer Reviews

Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, and Community Websites: How to setup, configure and customise this powerful PHP/MySQL based Open Source CMS

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Drupal is an incredibly powerful CMS, but with that power, comes a lot of complexity. It is, in some ways, very different than most other CMS's out there, which adds to the learning curve. But many would say that it may be one of the strongest because of these differences... this is something each user will have to determine for themselves.

Who this book is not for... anyone who has a strong understanding of Drupal, perhaps already customizing Drupal.

Who this book is for... anyone starting out new with Drupal, struggling to gain an understanding, and certainly anyone new to CMS that has chosen Drupal or is considering Drupal.

I think previous posts did a good job of recapping some of the key sections, so I won't rehash those as they are pretty good and fair descriptions.

As the book even recommends, there is much information on the Drupal site, both online documentation and in the forums. So why buy a book? The online Drupal documentation is primarily a set of technical documents... not strictly dry technical, but still primarily focused on the "what." However, anyone just getting started will likely feel overwhelmed or just confused with trying to dig through that type of documentation. It is a must, but may be better off left for doing after reading this book. And some of us just like to page through a book and have a reference at our side, not to mention, reading tons of information online can be a bit harsh on the eyes after awhile.

At the time of this writing, to my knowledge, there is only one other book, "Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress" from Apress. As I have both, I can say that it is also an excellent book. The immediate thought may be "which one should I get?" Perhaps both, but either way, don't misjudge by size, as the Apress book combines three scripts into one book, so actual content length is fairly comparable between the two.

I would highly recommend this book as a starting point for anyone new. It provides a few more visuals with screenshots than the other book does, and does a great job walking you through a "hypothetical" example, much like a tutorial. The Apress book though would be an excellent next step, as it goes into a much deeper level, including multi-sites (running multiple sites off of one Drupal installation) which isn't even covered in this book, and more details on themeing. However, the Apress book might also be a bit overwhelming if you are really starting out at square one.

I had actually gone through the exact opposite approach... read the online documentation first, then the Apress book, then this book. The two books are laid out a little differently, and while there is obviously some overlap, Mercer and Douglass both have their own styles and presented information a little differently, so you may find that things you are confused on in one book may click in the other. That was certainly my case and I can only imagine that things would have clicked even faster had I read everything in the opposite order as I had.

If you've read the Apress book or any of the online docs, you'll still gain from Mercer's book, however I'd highly recommend starting here first if you can.

I would liked to have seen a little more information, and would really have liked to have seen more information on themeing and multi-site. These can be quite complex, but David does a nice job of presenting information so it would have been nice to see how he did on presenting these more complex topics. Both this and the Apress book are listed as Beginner-Intermediate, but I would consider this book to be more on the Beginner side and the Apress book to be more on the Intermediate side... again, making them a pretty good 1+2 combination.

This is a good introduction to the concepts behind drupal and explains some concepts like taxonomy and access control with great depth. For an aspiring drupal site admin it is a great book to read.

Once.

It is not an in-depth guide to drupal, but more of a technical overview of the concept. Most of the content is available in similar form online.

It is very easy to understand and if you learn things better with a physical book, this is a good choice.

Drupal has suffered somewhat in recent months, in comparison to other CMSs such as Joomla. Whereas Joomla, which many developers consider to be a technically inferior CMS, has steamrollered ahead, Drupal has kept on plodding along. If you don't believe me, go to Google Trends and see how the number of people searching for Joomla has doubled every three months while Drupal has inched slowly upwards, barely doubling in the last two years. Part of Joomla's comparative success has been its branding success. Whereas Drupal has a slightly intimidating blue head for a logo and a staunchly community-orientated focus, Joomla presents a more friendly image with a colourful logo and plenty of commercial options available.

Whether the Drupal community wants or needs to keep up with such a rapid expansion is one question, but books such as "Drupal - Creating Blogs, Forms, Portals and Community Websites" by David Mercer can certainly help encourage more users.
It is stronger than many other CMS books for two key reasons, First, it hasn't been been translated in the somewhat uneven and typo-strewn manner of similar books. Second, it attempts to show people the wider picture of what is involved in building a website - it delves into how to plan and think about your site rather than just the nuts and bolts of how to build it.

The first chapter introduces Drupal with a heavy emphasis on using Drupal.org to find out more. This is sensible as so much introductory material is available online. The second chapter on setting up a development environment is the chapter I had most problems with, because it doesn't quite explain things simply enough for someone setting out to build their own website for the first time. If you now how to use shell command to set up a Drupal site on your own computer you'll be fine but otherwise you'll just be following instructions without gaining much understanding.

The book then hits its stride in Chapter 3 (administration), Chapter 4 (frontend functionality) and Chapter 5 (access control). For anyone wanting to learn how to run a Drupal site, this middle section is invaluable as are Chapters 6 and 7 deal with adding content to your site. This section alone makes the book worth the purchase price because of its numerous screenshots and clear explanations.

Chapter 8 is the theme chapter and is more involved with modifications to existing themes than explaining how to create them. Chapter 9 is an odd mixture of "advanced features" that could do with more focus and explanation. At one point it mentions, "use something like the following command line..." which is not very useful for beginners. Partly however this is a limitation of Drupal itself which does require quite a lot of code work to run particular task. Chapter 10 goes beyond the title of the book to focus not just on creating but on running your Drupal site, including throttling, cron jobs and SEO.

Overall, "Drupal - Creating Blogs, Forms, Portals and Community Websites" is recommended. I've given it to clients in recent weeks and will continue to do so. It explains the Drupal basics but also has enough meat to help people to move beyond to develop a more advanced site.

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.

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.

Major changes between Drupal versions render the book's content out of date.
Neither the publisher's nor the author's pages show any indication of addressing the changes from Drupal 4.7 to 5.1. What content there is lacks focus.

Save your $$$ and read the online docs instead.

If you are new to Drupal (and those are the only people who shold be buying this book), I suggest you think twice about it. This book is perfectly good and I got a lot of value out of it when I was starting out a few months back, but there is a NEWER VERSION out. The new edition covers Drupal version 6 which is the latest version of the Drupal software. This edition covers version 5.

The only reason why you might want this book now is if you are new to Drupal AND you specifically have reason to be using Drupal version 5. If that's you, then this book is for you.

Note: If you do buy this book, do not follow his instructins about installing Apache2Triad. I did and only later learned that this is a very old package that is not well supported. After a few months, I switched over to XAMPP, a much more widely used and current Apache/mySQL/PHP/Perl implementation.

Probably ok to get started for mickey mouse web sites. Really does not explain the architecture of Drupal, and how you can build dynamic sites.

Way too many pages for what it covers. Editing could have been so much better.

There is a crying need for a Drupal book that explains:
1. architecture
2. quick tutorial on how to get started with static pages
3. quick tutorial on how to get dynamic behavior driven by an underlying database
4. quick tutorial on how to exploit AJAX and get Web2.0 behaviors
5. detailed chapters on major sections (the table of contents for this book is good, it's just the content is too light weight)

Just my opinion, of course.

This book is virtually published online in the form of the handbook. Drupal has a notoriously bad, confusing, complicated forum. This book is only helpful in the early, early stages of development. It's easy to read and follow, but answers none of the more intermediate question you may have almost instantly. I'd prefer to wait for an advanced guide, or until the Drupal community can create a better forum.

I have been converting a static website into a drupal website for the last 32 weeks. Drupal has a steep learning curve and besides I only have limited time to learn it and develop the new site.

I honestly have to say that when I bought this book at week 2 it did not help me a great deal. Back then I would have rated it 2 stars. Now I would rate it 4 stars simply because some of this stuff is starting to make sense. The book definitely will help you but you have to get up to speed first.

There is simply a lot of detail to Drupal, which is reflected in the book. Author David Mercer does a fairly good job, but a good tech editor could have made the difference. Nevertheless, this book does make sense once you have waded through the volumes of information on the Drupal Forums and have gone through a rite of passage. The Drupal Forums are a life saver and Drupal's power is incredible.

The book's discussion on Advanced Content in Chapter 7 on Categorization is well written and full of examples. Also the chapters on running your website are invaluable.

So my advice is to buy the book and hold on to it. You'll be referring to it constantly.