Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6 View Larger Image | David Mercer
PACKT Publishing, Paperback, Published April 2008, 330 pages, ISBN 1847192971 | List Price: $44.99
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Drupal is a hugely popular and widely celebrated open-source Content Management
System that is day-by-day becoming the first choice of people in the know for
building blogs and other websites. Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the father of the Internet),
Hillary Clinton and many others utilize Drupal to fulfill their online requirements.
Drupal is an elegantly designed, well-supported and flexible platform that
anyone can use in order to create their own website. With such a powerful tool
at your fingertips there is no longer any need to pay professionals to design
a site when you can do the same job yourself absolutely free. All it takes is
a bit of practice!
This book meets the booming demand for well presented, clear, concise, and
above all practical information on how to move from knowing you want a website
all the way through to designing and building it like a pro, and finally successfully
managing and maintaining it.
Experienced technical author David Mercer expertly guides the reader through
all the stages of building a professional website in a plain, articulate manner.
Aimed in particular at beginners to Drupal, this book will allow readers to
advance rapidly up the learning curve to the point where they can tackle any
problem with confidence.
What you will learn from this book
• Plan and consider various design aspects of your site
• Install, set up, and configure a Drupal development machine
• Find your way around the vast array of Drupal settings with ease
• Add and work with modules to enhance your website’s functionality
• Control and managing your site's content
• Deal with security issues, users, and access control
• Implement a customized interface for your website
• Add powerful new features and learn advanced techniques
• Deploy, manage, and maintain your website
Approach
Written in the same style as the original Drupal title, this book is a pragmatic
look at the steps necessary to get a website up and running. Drawing on years
of writing experience, David Mercer utilizes a friendly, engaging style that
is both clear and concise – perfect for the Drupal newbie.
Who this book is written for
This book is for people with little or no experience in website design, people
who are not familiar with PHP, MySQL or HTML, and above all people with little
to no experience in using Drupal. Even intermediate Drupal users will find this
book of interest although it is specifically aimed at pushing beginners up the
learning curve.
Contents
Chapter 1 introduces you to the world of Drupal and looks at where Drupal comes
from, where it’s going, and what it can offer you. We also scrutinize the
Drupal community and learn how to make the most of Drupal as an organized, living
entity and not simply a piece of software.
Chapter 2 deals with how to get everything you need up and running on a development
machine and also briefly looks at how all the requisite technologies gel together
to produce a working Drupal site. Once everything is up and running, and after
looking over some of the more common installation problems, the chapter presents
a brief tour of Drupal in order to give you an idea of what to expect.
Chapter 3 sees us adding functionality to the newly created site. The focus
of this chapter is on modules and blocks and how to add and enable them, and
even how to obtain modules that are not part of the standard distribution. Given
that menus and primary links are closely associated with a site's functionality,
these are also covered here.
Chapter 4 looks at the most general settings that all Drupal administrators
need to contend with. Everything from determining your site's name to dealing
with the file system settings gets treated here.
Chapter 5 concerns itself with the topic of access control. Drupal has a sophisticated
role-based access control system, which is fundamentally important for controlling
how users access a site. This chapter will give you the information you need
to implement whatever access controls you require.
Chapter 6 gets to the heart of the matter by beginning the book's coverage
on content. Working with content, what content types are available, administering
content, and even a discourse on some of the more common content-related modules
serve as a basis for moving to more advanced content-related matters that follow
in the next chapter.
Chapter 7 gives you the edge when it comes to creating engaging and dynamic
content. While this chapter doesn't require you to be an expert in HTML, PHP,
and CSS it does introduce you to the basics and shows how, with a little knowledge,
extremely powerful and professional content can be created. That's only half
the story, because it also looks at categorization and how this particular feature
of Drupal sets it apart from everything else out there.
Chapter 8 gives you a run down of how attractive, functional interfaces are
created in Drupal through the use of themes. As well as discussing briefly some
of the considerations that must be taken into account when planning your website,
it shows how to make important modifications to your chosen theme.
Chapter 9 really adds the icing on the cake by looking at a host of more advanced
topics. From dynamic and responsive content using JavaScript and native jQuery
support to supporting opened and implementing actions and triggers, you learn
to enhance your website and add that something special.
Chapter 10 takes a pragmatic look at the type of tasks in which you will need
to be proficient in order to successfully run and maintain a Drupal site. Whether
it’s setting up cron jobs or making backups of your database, everything
you need to do throughout the course of running your newly created website is
covered here.
Appendix A deals with the all-important topic of deployment. Because all major
work should be done on a copy of your website on a development machine, this
appendix presents a sound process for taking the finished product and making
it available for public consumption on your live domain.
About the Author
David Mercer was born in August 1976 in Harare, Zimbabwe. Having always had
a strong interest in science, David came into regular contact with computers
at university where he graduated cum laude with majors in applied math and math
(although he minored in computer science).
As a programmer and professional writer who has been writing both code and
books for about nine years, he has worked on a number of well known titles,
in various capacities, on a wide variety of topics. His books have sold tens
of thousands of copies and have been translated into over 6 different languages
to date.
David finds that the challenges arising from the dichotomous relationship between
the science (and art) of software programming and the art (and science) of writing
is what keeps his interest in producing books piqued. He will no doubt continue
to write professionally in the future.
David balances his time between programming, reviewing, writing, and contributing
to interesting web-based projects such as RankTracer and LinkDoozer. When he
isn't working (which isn't that often) he enjoys playing guitar (generally on
stage and unrehearsed) and getting involved in outdoor activities ranging from
touch rugby and golf to water skiing and snowboarding. Visit RankTracer or find
him on LinkDoozer where he is generally lurking.
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