The Drupal CMS helps a team of administrators, writers, artists, and moderators work together on a web site. This book covers the basics that the content creators will need to plug in.
Drupal is a popular, serviceable content management system, and this book by David Mercer is one you’ll want to have around, even if you never open it. If you’re reasonably up to speed on Apache, MySQL, and basic admin topics such as cron and permissions, you won’t need the book to get Drupal going. Most of the things you can break are easy to revert. We use Drupal at LinuxWorld.com, and it works fine.
The people you’ll want the book for are the other members of the web group — everyone who’s helping you with the art, layout, content, and moderating comments and forums. Drupal does make it easy for anyone who can fill out a web form to get good-looking, user-friendly pages up. Get people excited about how easy it is and get them going creating new templates and blogs, and everyone will be more productive.
Before you get started with this book, get a razor blade or an X-Acto® knife and carefully remove pages 163 to 176. Page 163 is fine, but you’ll need to cut it out to remove 164, which is the beginning of a section infected with “taxonomitis”, the debilitating affliction of Drupal sites everywhere. You’ll have to photocopy just the 163 side of page 163-164 and glue it back. Nobody remembers site taxonomy anyway, no matter how carefully you design it, so just turn on free tagging and be done with it. You’ll save yourself much user confusion, webmaster category-picking time, and soul-numbing “lumpers vs. splitters” meetings.
This book is helpfully written for the needs of a fairly common typical Drupal user: someone who runs Microsoft Windows on the desktop, has a Drupal hosting service, and wants to build out the site on the Windows box. This user will rejoice in “Apache2Triad”: a pre-bundled Apache, PHP and MySQL stack. It installs with a Windows installer and includes phpMyAdmin for configuring the MySQL database from the Web. Depending on how you configure your site’s development, staging and production servers, this could be helpful. Why not give the Web graphics person a live Drupal on his desktop box to try new templates with real content?
There is some great material on working with blocks. You can rearrange substantial chunks of a page without manually editing a template, but the interface that lets you do it is a little more puzzling than the rest of Drupal. The book will help you do as much as possible of the layout the easy way.
Some interesting Drupal add-ons from around the net get a mention, but so many new ones are coming along that you’ll probably want to visit a few of your favorite Drupal-based sites regularly for ideas of modules to borrow.
Don’t look for a module-writing guide here. If your site has any unique functionality, you’ll need to start reading and borrowing from existing modules to get started with that. But giving the rest of the Web team the confidence and knowledge to handle all that art and writing stuff will give you more time to concentrate on the PHP code, which is the fun part, right?
