Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions

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.