This review was originally printed in the June 2009 edition of the UKUUG newsletter, which is now defunct.
Title: Using Drupal (1st edition)
Authors: Heather Berry, Angela Byron, James Walker, Jeff Eaton, Nathan Haug, Jeff Robbins
ISBN: 9780596515805
If you haven’t heard of Drupal, you’ve probably visited a site powered by it at some point, from KernelTrap to Yahoo! Research and MTV. Using varying combinations of modules, you can create a content management system customised to your needs, though this enormous flexibility comes at the cost of sometimes not knowing where to start. Thankfully help is at hand from the six authors who have contributed to Using Drupal, three of whom are directly involved in developing the software.
The introduction to this book is mercifully brief and the authors appear to have avoided the temptation to pad out the entire first chapter with a tedious step by step explanation of how to install the software on every platform imaginable (for this see the comprehensive appendix or the Drupal site). Instead we are treated to a simple explanation of how content management systems work with specific examples from Drupal. The next chapter moves at a rapid pace and takes you through a number of common tasks, such as setting up user permissions and changing themes.
After getting you up and running with the basics, the remainder of the book consists of a number of case studies, from a job board to event management, with multi-lingual sites and customised themes also getting a look in. Most impressive of all, the appendix lists the modules and themes used in each chapter, so you can easily recreate the same environment on your own hosting platform, should you wish to.
The most useful chapter for me covered building a wiki with Drupal. This is something which I’ve been looking at for some time, particularly because the existing wiki solutions tend to have poor access control (particularly Mediawiki) or are difficult to integrate with an existing site. With this chapter to hand, I now have all the software and configuration steps I need to get started, as opposed to having to trawl through dozens of search results trying to work out which wiki module to use and how to set it up as the developer hasn’t given any thought to documentation.
So far, so good. However, the major potential problem with any book which covers a web application is that the content is often out of date even before the text hits the printers. Fortunately, Using Drupal manages to cover the latest major version, and six months on it is still sufficiently up to date to be a useful guide to the software.
Overall, this book is well worth a look if you are thinking of setting up a Drupal site or want to do more with your existing instance. Whilst the Drupal web site does include some excellent documentation to get you started, I have yet to find an online source which takes me through the whole process of setting up and customising a Drupal site in a coherent manner. This book fills the gap nicely.