Product Description

Everybody knows that a business needs a website for its growth and customer interface. However, building a website can be a difficult as well as time consuming process if you do it yourself. Simple website builders do not give you access to modern functionality and can be difficult to maintain. Paying a website designer to build a complete custom website can be very expensive and you need to pay every time you want a simple change.

Drupal is a powerful, free system that anyone can use in order to create their own website. With such a powerful tool at your fingertips there is no longer any need to pay professionals to design a site when you can do the same job yourself absolutely free.

This book is your step-by-step guide to building your business website in Drupal, complete with a blog, events calendar, catalogue of products and services, and more.

In this book, we will build a complete website for a fictional client from scratch. We start at the beginning by downloading and installing Drupal, progress to creating and editing pages, and then we explore the most popular modules for Drupal. All functionality is presented in a clear step-by-step format which is easy to follow as you build your own site.

This book will explore several modules that will allow you to do everything from adding calendars and events to integrating content from Flickr and YouTube. Each chapter adds some features to your website and brings you closer to your customers.

At the end of the book, you should be able to build a site on your own or have the confidence and knowledge to hire a professional to develop a site for you which meets your business needs. You will get connected to your customers and find ways to make more money.

Approach

This book takes a step-by-step approach to building a complete website using Drupal and enhancing it to include modern technology used by cutting-edge companies. All instructions are written in such a way that they make sense to readers of any technical level.

An example restaurant website is set up and each chapter adds some exciting and powerful feature to this website. Though the book talks about the restaurant, these features can be used in any small/medium size business.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #392867 in Books
• Published on: 2008-12-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

From the Publisher

Who this book is written for?

This book is designed primarily for business owners who want to create a new website for their company or upgrade a company website to be easier to maintain and have advanced capabilities.

Whether you know Drupal or not, this book will be your guide to a powerful website.

What you will learn from this book?

• Create a user-friendly, professional looking, and branded site with clear navigation
• Incorporate a blog or `latest news' page to keep your customers informed about new products, announce special offers, post news about your company, and share information that will attract prospective customers to you
• Build a product catalogue with categories, product images, and custom information
• Add e-commerce features so customers can order and buy products online
• Use a built-in "events calendar" for upcoming special events and occasions
• Build a community by integrating with user-generated content on Flickr and YouTube
• Use Google Maps to make it easy for customers to find you -- display a professional map on your "where to find us" page
• Essential maintenance tasks: upgrading Drupal, keeping backups, and optimizing performance

About the Author

Mark Noble

Mark Noble has worked in software development and website design for over 13 years in a variety of capacities including development, quality assurance, and management. He takes pride in developing software and websites to make businesses run more effectively and delights in helping users to get their jobs done more easily.

Mark currently works developing websites to help libraries manage their books. He also does occasional contract work for clients in a variety of industries.

When he isn't in front of a computer, Mark enjoys playing with his family, photography, and geocaching.

Mark Noble

Mark Noble has worked in software development and website design for over 13 years in a variety of capacities including development, quality assurance, and management. He takes pride in developing software and websites to make businesses run more effectively and delights in helping users to get their jobs done more easily.

Mark currently works developing websites to help libraries manage their books. He also does occasional contract work for clients in a variety of industries.

When he isn't in front of a computer, Mark enjoys playing with his family, photography, and geocaching.

Customer Reviews

Definitely helps you build some site solutions with Drupal
I've just read Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions by Mark Noble and think it's got a lot of good things going on. This book, like a lot of Drupal books out there, presents some basic methods for installing and setting up a Drupal website but what it does differently is look at every tutorial and example through the lens of a small business.

In fact, the whole book is tutorial after tutorial of setting up Drupal with this same small business in mind. The example business is described as a restaurant with a well known chef, with specific clientele, particular menu, etc. The whole book is a great example in assessing the needs of this business and then working out Drupal solutions to get there. Granted, I don't know think there are many famous chefs are out there building their own websites, but this is besides the point.

I've got a background in technology training, including training for Drupal, and I am definitely sensitive to the prospective reader's learning needs. Technical books can sometimes advertise themselves to the wrong audience and leave some new learners in the dust. But I'm happy to say that this one passes my learner sensors without any difficult issues.

Like a lot of the books coming from Packt Publishing, the preface lays down some assumptions on who the book is intended to help and what tools readers will need to follow along at home. The author's got a pretty good workflow for configuring a newly installed Drupal website, and moves from basic to advanced at a appropriate pace. The path through the Drupal principles is, for the most part, clear and well designed. The lessons were concise and easy to grasp.

There were only a few parts where I though some principles were presented out of order, like right in Chapter 2 there is a small segment on installing and enabling new modules smack in the middle of a bigger section on creating pages. But these diversions aren't terribly distracting and do manage to inform the task at hand for first time readers.

Some of the chapters and topics don't get the depth that they deserve and have the chance to leave a reader stranded. Chapter 9, for example, deals with the ecommerce package known as Ubercart, but is very seriously abbreviated. This topic, and ecommerce in general, is one that probably requires a whole additional book to fully teach and grasp and there is at least one Drupal ecommerce book on the market right now.

All told, the book reads just as advertised and makes good on its promise of "building powerful web site features for your business." If anyone is looking for a book with great practical examples and very accessible scenarios, then this would be my recommendation.

DIY Cool Drupal Website
Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions by Mark Noble

This is another book in the Packt Publishing series on using Drupal. To quote from the back cover ... "This book is designed primarily for business owners who want to create a new web site for their company or upgrade an existing company web site to make it easier to maintain and have advanced capabilities."

I really like "cookbook" examples for technical subjects - show me how to build something useful by way of good examples and I will figure out how to modify the recipe to be what I want. Well not only does this book do that very well but it is almost really a cookbook -- the example used for the whole book is a chef run restaurant!

One thing notable about this book is the number of add-on modules explored during the building of this web site. In addition to the expected CCK and Views there are lots of non-core modules that are used in the example chapters.

This book is an overview that doesn't spend much of it's time on the low level details. It does a good job showing off important functionality that is freely available to use and pretty easy to configure. This will get your web site up and running quickly.

Chapter One is your basic install Drupal but by Chapter 2 you are adding new functionality by creating an image gallery using a variety of optional functionality.

Chapter 3 -- we start to create a product / service listing -- in this case the restaurants menu that provides a good online experience that is easy to maintain.

In chapter 4 we move to interacting with customers and visitors - setting up users, comments, ratings, polls and surveys.

Chapter 5 moves to using and consuming blogs. How to setup and moderate multiple blogs for your staff and then bring content from other web sites into your site as added value.

Chapter 6 takes us to creating an online / email newsletter and an events calendar.

Chapters 7 & 8 move to integrating external data from YouTube, Flickr and Google Maps to provide the "web 2.0" experience we all expect and then how to include download able content for your site visitors.

Chapter 9 goes way out there and adds online ordering and payment to our restaurant web site using the ubercart family of modules ..... pre paid takeout!!

The rest of the book is devoted to the behind the scenes of keeping the site working and how to find good resources to help give the site the finished professional look you may not be able to get to on your own.

The next step would be to dig into Drupal Theming http://www.packtpub.com/drupal-6-themes/ and / or Drupal Module Development http://www.packtpub.com/drupal-6-module-development both of which go well beyond the basic configuration skills required for this book.

The author has decided to cover a lot of material in this book by providing a good overview of functionality. But the trade off is cover half of the material or use twice the pages to cover the material more in depth.

Overall I find this book another useful addition to the Drupal universe. No one book will make you a Drupal expert but having a good variety of books available makes getting there easier.

Useful for site builders, developers, or owners wanting to connect with hired professionals
I am in the process of making a new site for someone with a nice looking, but aging site that was built on Drupal 4.7, which is no longer supported. I am looking through the site's functionality and theme and have upgraded both to use Drupal 5, but only to be sure that it has current security updates while I make plans with the owner for a complete redesign.

While researching ideas and functionality to present for use in the new site, I ran across a brand new book from Packt Press called Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions that I found enjoyable, and very useful. Now, I already know what I am doing with Drupal. I know how to read the project's documentation to find and configure modules and themes, and I know how to get help if I need it. Even so, this book gave me some great ideas that I am going to share with the owner of the site I am working on and that I hope to use.

The entire book centers around creating a website for a fictional company, The Good Eatin' Bistro. You start out with a discussion of the basic needs for the company, then begin with the basics of creating a site suitable to the customer's needs. As the book progresses, you learn how to use some well-known and some other less-known modules to add interesting and useful functionality to the site that makes information easy to find and interesting to view.

Do you want a site that allows all members of a project you are involved in to have individual blogs, with a calendar to display events, and a map? No problem. Have a restaruant and want to put your menu online in a way that looks good, and is easily changed. Easy. Are you interested in creating a newsletter that people viewing your site can sign up to recieve occasionally? You can. All this and a ton more are in the book.

I think one of the most useful parts of the book for most people will be the last chapter, which talks about how to find out how to add functionality not discussed in the book, where to get help, and has some great tips on things that not everyone thinks about like hosting, hardware, and working with developers and artists.

One thing that crossed my mind is sharing the book with the owner of the site I mentioned. He won't understand the technical details, but this book is written in a way that I believe will make what I am doing very clear and make it much easier for him to talk with me about his hopes, plans and desires. For that reason alone, the book is valuable to me, and it might be to others as well who are not actually interested in creating a site themselves, but who need to know enough detail to be able to discuss site building intelligently with a developer, designer or team of people working to create a site for them.

The book does not cover theming, but focuses solely on enabling features, enabling and configuring new functionality to a site built on Drupal 6. If you are interested in theming Drupal 6, there is another book by Packt that discusses that topic in detail, as well as several other good ones out there.