Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites
by David Mercer
267 pp.
PACKT Publishing May 2006
ISBN 1-904811-80-9
Reviewed by Tim Torgerson

With clear and concise prose and an easy, friendly manner, author David Mercer adeptly guides the reader in setting-up, configuring and customizing Drupal, the PHP/MySQL-based, open source, content management system. Mercer pulls up a chair along side us to provide a knowledgeable hand in designing, developing and deploying a Drupal-based website. Whether it's discussing network settings or writing code, Mercer's good humor and sound advice creates the encouraging environment open source is meant to have.

Chapter 1: Introduction to Drupal provides an overview of the history and uses of Drupal, along with the basics of site building and planning. Mercer approaches the task in a practical and personable style,

If you get stuck [while planning your site], or run out of ideas, it's helpful to try a little thought exercise as follows. Split yourself into two people:

The community member who knows what his or her needs are

The Drupal administrator who needs to find out what to build (11) Use the administrator persona to question the community member about what has to be done. Approaching the problem from two perspectives often helps mimic real-world situations where software developers try to find out exactly what their clients need by asking probing questions before they start working on a project.

Creating a demo site to illustrate the planning and development process, Mercer is careful to reference the Drupal community, handbooks, and downloads, placing the would-be Drupaler comfortably in the midst of ample and accessible support.

In Chapter 2: Setting up the Drupal Environment Mercer explains the setup process in greater detail: creating the development environment, obtaining and installing Apache, MySQL & PHP, upgrading Drupal and a setup troubleshooting section. Mercer attentively explains the steps for a successful setup without assuming too much technical knowledge. Throughout the book, Mercer stresses the importance of understanding the fundamentals as a long-term strategy for a successful site,

I know most of you will be eager to get going at the moment, and might well prefer to dive straight into making modifications to you Drupal site. Before we do so, it will be of real benefit for you to take a few moments to read over this section to gain an appreciation of how everything is put together behind the scenes. Having a basic knowledge of how the various technologies co-operate in order to provide you with a working Drupal site, will help you immeasurably in the long run (32).

Chapter 3: Basics I presents site configuration: site name, slogan, mission; how to set clean URLs, the cache, file systems and rss. Clean URLs? Don't worry—in each section of every chapter, Mercer provides quick and easy definitions for technical terms that may be ponderous to the non-Drupaler,

Many of you may have noticed that whenever you make a request to Drupal, the URL of the page you are taken to looks something like this: "http://lolalhost/frupal/?q=node/add." This is the default form of URLs in Drupal, and it is unfortunate because obviously the "?q=" is not very attractive. Worse it may interfere with your site being indexed by search engines (66).

Chapter 4 Basics II is about adding functionality, including downloading, installing and configuring modules, setting languages and translations, how to handle blocks and the different content types: blog, forum, page, poll, and story. Mercer reminds the reader of the value of the open source model when it comes to adding modules for greater functionality,

One of the greatest things about Drupal is that it adheres to the open-source paradigm. This fosters community development, which in turn promotes and increases the diversity of any given project. One of the spin-offs from this is that community members who overcome certain obstacles or create something new and useful can, and often do, take the time to share it with everyone else. This is an exceptionally valuable property of most, if not all open-source projects (72).

I've found the Drupal community to be especially strong in providing support and solutions; besides the simple and robust nature of the software itself, the active and accessible Drupal community is one best features of this CMS.

Chapter 5 covers planning an access policy for selecting users, rules, permissions and taxonomy control settings, while Chapters 6 & 7 delve deeper into content, administration, modules, html, php, categorization, vocabularies and hierarchy.

Chapter 8 guides the reader through planning and using a web-based interface, including visual design, language, images. Mercer delves into the specifics of configuring and customizing themes and designing css pages and this is where his demo site is especially helpful, demonstrating the theme customization and configurations.

Chapter 9 covers Drupal advanced features, modifications including Flexinode and Adsense; Chapter 10 covers running your website, backups, phpMyAdmin, cron, schedule and poormanscron.

Appendix: Deployment outlines the process for making sure your host is ready, setting up a new database, transferring files and site configuration. Mercer stresses the importance of rigorous site test and provides a testing checklist to assist.

This a very useful, readable and intelligent manual for the would-be Drupaler—sure to hearten and buoy the spirit of any who may be intimidated by the prospect of implementing a CMS. Mercer's method and manner will rally not only the faint of heart—it will instill sound practices to help ensure making the most of a Drupal-powered website.