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…
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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
THE book for any new or intermediate Drupal user,
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…
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|This should be everyone’s second Drupal book,
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.
Was this review helpful to you?
|Great for contributed modules,
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.
Was this review helpful to you?
|