Submitted by patrick on Sun, 06/21/2009 - 23:20
Posted in
| Drupal 6 Social Networking | ||
|---|---|---|
| Author | Michael Peacock |  |
| Publisher | Packt Publishing / Birmingham | |
| First published | February 2009 | |
| Pages | 312 | |
| ISBN | 978-1-847196-10-1 | |
| List price | €30.99 (Ordering / Product information) | |
Websites consisting entirely of static content have become out of fashion. In the Web 2.0 era, user interaction and community functions are expected features. However, such functionalities cannot be provided through plain HTML and CGI scripts in a manageable way any longer. This is where Content Management Systems come into play.
Using a CMS like Drupal to build a community website requires a lot of skill and training, both technically and in marketing. Michael Peacock's "Drupal 6 Social Networking" sets out to teach the freshman Drupalist the basic principles.
Structure and content
"Drupal 6 Social Networking" does not follow a strict one topic per chapter structure. Instead, it's organization could probably best be described as a guided tour through Drupal, which heavily uses dialog screenshots to explain what is where and how it works.
It introduces concepts in about the some order, in which one would expect a new user to explore the CMS.
Chapter one contains the obligatory introduction to Content Management Systems, their purpose and a walk through for installing Drupal on a WAMP or XAMPP server as well as an explanation of the more important items in Drupal's adminstration menu.
With a fresh installation of the software ready, chapter two dives into terminology, concepts and basic administration of Drupal.
Chapter three turns over to the module system, explaining in detail the scope of operation, Drupal supports out of the box as well as to how to install contributed modules.
Chapter four deals with user management. The three main topics here being, user profiles, integration with off-site services, such as Gravatar and OpenID and of course basic account administration.
Chapter five adds user interaction to the mix, by introducing several modules, implementing common community website functions like guestbooks, friendlists and instant messaging.
No community site can work without the site manager being able to communicate with users in order to alert them about maintenance or send them newsletters. How this can be done is the main topic in chapter 6.
Stock modules and themes can always only bring a website so far. Chapter seven and eight cover the basics of module and theme development.
Software is not subject to wear and tear. However, it still needs maintenance, which mainly means doing backups and deploying security fixes. Chapter nine files the reader in on basic administration duties, required to keep everything ship shaped.
The final chapter of the book deals with marketing aspects. How to attract new users and ways for monetizing a community website.
Last but not least, the appendix gives instructions for installing a WAMP system (Windows Apache Mysql and PHP) with Drupal.
With this broad selection of topics, "Drupal 6 Social Networking" touches all aspects vital for what Drupalists call "community plumbing", but doesn't go into detail so much as to hinder easy reading.
Conclusion
"Drupal 6 Social Networking" is an easy to understand, beginner level book, that does not require previous knowledge beyond being familiar with the webbrowser and basic system administration.
Besides it's somewhat fuzzy chapter structure, I have two main issues with this book:
- The title as well as the cover description raises high expectations. Building and running community websites requires a lot of skill and knowledge. Something the size of Myspace or Facebook is clearly beyond what the book can teach.
- "Drupal 6 Social Networking" builds upon a case-study labeled "Dinospace - The social network for pet dino owners". Unfortunately, Michael Peacock fails to truly bring it to live. Instead of showing how to plan and implement a community website from scratch, the book rather turns out to be a dino themed walkthrough for Drupal.
All in all, I'd say that "Drupal 6 Social Networking" is a good reference for learning Drupal. It significantly shortens the time needed to get familiar with the CMS and especially with it's Web 2.0 features. I'd recommend it for freshman Drupalists and people, who are in the process of evaluating, whether or not Drupal is the right CMS for their business.