Book Reviews

Merely ten years ago, building websites was a daunting and costly challenge. This changed significantly with the advent of content management systems and nowadays, hardly any new website is build without the help of one.

Drupal is such a content management system and about to be released in it's seventh version. In his likewise named book, "Drupal 7", David Mercer sets out to introduce this new version.

Structure and Content

The book lacks a central theme, making it essentially a screenshot rich showcase for the seventh version Drupal.

The web has leveraged postal shopping. Webshops have established themselves as a cost efficient alternative to printing and mailing catalogs to customers. With Drupal and Ubercart, online stores can nowadays be operated at a fraction of the cost and size of the original mail-order outlets, allowing even small companies to enter the market.

Structure and Content

Drupal is a flexible and versatile Content Management System. It has two major disadvantages, though. The first is being written in PHP, the second is storing content in an SQL database.
PHP is an interpreted, not a compiled language, requiring the scripts to be parsed over and over again, each time a page is requested. SQL is a database concept that adds a considerable amount of overhead to information retrieval.
These two facts make up for a substantial performance hit, even on less trafficked websistes.

Drupal is a flexible Content Management System. So flexible, that it could be considered to be the web 2.0 equivalent of a swiss army knife. Swiss army knifes however, as versatile as they might be, can sometimes be a bit confusing to the user. The purpose of the individual tools may occasionally not be clear and the vast numbers of different models available for sale can make it hard to choose the right version for the right job.

In Drupal 6 Site Blueprints, Timi Ogunjobi sets out to provide the reader with 12 hands on examples for how the "swiss army knife" Drupal can be put to a use.

Drupal is a widely adopted open source Content Management System. For it's users, this wide adoption brings a number of advantages like, for example, well maintained code and ready to use solutions to many standard problems, but there is also one inherent disadvantage.
Out of the box, every Drupal installation looks the same. Being indistinguishable from other websites is a no-go in the web 2.0 world. Contributed themes may lessen this problem to a degree, but even they reach their limits, when corporate design becomes a requirement.

Drupal is a very powerful and feature rich content management framework with hundreds of contributed modules, extending it's core functionality. However, even with all of those third party add-ons, a lot of website owners will sooner or later find themselves in a situation, where a desired service can only be implemented by creating a custom module.

When it comes to module development, Drupal's biggest advantage is also it's biggest disadvantage.

Software development is an expensive process and one of the most costly components in it is maintenance. This is an oddity, since software is not actually subject to wear and tear. It is however prone to error or malfunction and having to fix bugs in already deployed software is what can cause costs to explode.
In that respect, bugs are like aging wine. The older they get, the more expensive, they become. This makes it desirable to catch them as early as possible, by rigorously testing code before it makes it's way into a finished product.

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.

When I first read the title of the book, my thoughts were "Oh great, two nested niche topics, only specialists could be interested in. Nobody without a strong technical background in the field will be able to understand it". I'm glad to say, that my first impression was utterly wrong.