Drupal book

Packt Publishing is at it again. They've published David Mercer's follow up to Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, and Community Websites, which was originally based on Drupal 4.7. The new book subtitled Build your own professional blog, forum, portal or community website with Drupal 6 tries to cater to the same audience but with greatly updated content.

David seems to be completely up to date on the Drupal 6 matters, as much as the March 2008 publication time allowed. This was one of the first Drupal 6 books on the market, and the author even managed to include a lengthy section on CCK. Hats off. Now that Views 2.0 is out for Drupal 6, many more people will consider using this new version as a base to start with. David caters to new users, not upgraders though, so this guide helps you get up to speed (and the Views covering books are still awaited on the market).

The book has a certain eye to detail in talking about things like setting up users and permissions. David even goes to note that setting up access rules for names or emails does not affect existing users. This practice was changed in recent Drupal versions, considering this a security bug instead of the way how Drupal works, and honestly, I don't think people expected to see this behavior noted in print. This attention to detail goes to extremes however in the examination of taxonomy. To my tastes, it would have been better to get down to more practical examples sooner instead of trying to organize the section around the theories of taxonomy. Same applies to coverage of HTML, where David tries to teach content producers certain HTML tags to write a feature-rich webpage. This might be a good idea for the theming section, but not where content is produced by end users.

With a book going into such details, you might think Drupal core fills up the pages in itself. This is however not the case. David goes to introduce contributed module installation right in chapter three with DHTML Menu module. Highly useful and/or popular modules such as Pathauto and Localization client are covered. So the book acknowledges that for building a website, Drupal core needs to be pimped up with contributed functionality. Another positive note in this approach is that even custom look and functionality is covered. In my humble opinion, this book does a modest but still better job in doing a custom theme then Ric Shreves' Drupal 5 themes accomplishes. JavaScript capabilities are also shown by integrating a custom JavaScript control.

All-in-all, I think this book is a good starter guide for Drupal 6 users, even if sometimes too detailed. You'll certainly need to be ready to learning a lot more from Views to CCK field modules while you actually build a more complex site, but starting off with a simpler website should be possible from the topics covered.

Packt Publishing is continually coming out with Drupal books for different verticals. They have a "Drupal for Education and E-Learning" title coming up, they sell the "Drupal Multimedia" title, and they are spot on with "Selling online with Drupal e-Commerce". Their target is the beginner who might have chosen another e-commerce software, and would only choose Drupal if directed from start to end to build user registrations, static pages and the e-commerce functionality itself.

Interestingly the original announcement of the book on Drupal.org spurred a lot of "why a book about a dead module, write about Ubercart instead". But this book is a testament that Drupal is really open, and the two competing (huge) module sets for e-commerce: Ubercart and e-Commerce are both moving along and worth evaluating.

Coincidentally I got this book for review just I was about to build the registration cart/wizard/payment interface for Drupalcon Szeged. We were in talks with Ryan Szrama from Ubercart who was about to sign up to help out with our payment system, I've been reading the book on the competing module suite, and at the end decided to assemble a custom built Signup, Signup Status and Simple Paypal modules based solution. I would not suggest you to go on a custom module set route unless you see your requirements really clearly, and feel adventurous enough to build an exceptionally tailored system for your own needs. (In our case, it turned out that our model was not as fitting to practice as we thought so, and an Ubercart / e-Commerce based system might have been a better fit). Generally, I'd suggest you to just grab a cookbook like this one and play along.

Because this book starts from the beginning and builds up a shop from the ground up, it will be useful to you even if you are not going to use e-commerce, but instead would take Ubercart. Some concepts will be a bit different, but you'll get an understanding of the issues involved with building a shop, including permissions, roles, branding, tax rules, payment and shipping details, securing sites and marketing the business. There is a lot of value in this book for beginner Drupal site builders beyond dealing with the e-commerce module itself. Basic concepts such as Drupal content and user management are explained, so that you can just take this book without buying a few hundred more pages on generic Drupal site building. On the other hand, appropriate contributed modules like Taxonomy Access Control, Image, Image Attach, CAPTCHA, Legal, Login Security, etc. are used and explained briefly where necessary. Of course this also means that if you need specific information on things such as Drupal theming, you'll need to refer to other resources, but that's not a pre-requisite to building a shop, right?

All-in-all, I'd suggest you to read this book, if you are a Drupal beginner looking to set up shop on the internet, or a somewhat experienced Drupal user, who never built a complex e-commerce site yet.