Product Description

Content management, blogs, and online forums are among the most significant online trends today, and Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress are three of the most popular open source applications facilitating these trends.

Drupal is a full content management system that allows you to create any type of website you desire, from an e-commerce to a community-based site. phpBB enables you to set up a bulletin board or forum. And WordPress is the software of choice for the exploding blog community. All three technologies are based on PHP and MySQL.

Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and Wordpress is authored by a team of experts. Robert T. Douglass recently created the Drupal-powered blog site NowPublic.com. Mike Little is a founder and contributing developer of the WordPress project. And Jared W. Smith has been a longtime support team member of phpBBHacks.com and has been building sites with phpBB since the first beta releases.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #477006 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

About the Author
Robert T. Douglass is a very active member of the Drupal community; he regularly submits patches to the core Drupal code and maintains several modules, including media and subscription. In 2005, due to the growing popularity of Drupal, he became a freelance Drupal consultant and programmer, working out of his home in Germany. His most recent project is NowPublic.com, a Drupal-powered site which unites the citizen journalist with the blogosphere.

Mike Little is one of the founders of the WordPress project and is still a contributing developer. He has been programming professionally for 15 years in a variety of languages including PHP, Java, JSP, Perl, and assembler.

Jared W. Smith has several years of experience administering, styling, and modifying the phpBB bulletin board software, and designed web sites in different forms for several years before that. He was among the original Support Team at phpBBHacks.com – the leading distributor of modifications and templates for phpBB – where he now serves in an advisory role.

Customer Reviews

Excellent book - clear and understandable in plain English
I have only read the Drupal section of the book, so I can't comment on the other two sections.

I have been trying to learn how this powerful CMS system works as I start my first Drupal site, and have spent many hours on the official website reading documentation and community posts from the incredibly helpful folks over there. However, sometimes computer people have a hard time communicating effectively with the less-technical among us. As an instructor myself, I constantly have to remind myself to slow down and make no assumptions when I teach - a skill it takes a long time to master.

This book is a shining example of that skill put to good use. The author is extremely talented at phrasing things in "real English" and makes no assumptions that the reader has any pre-existing knowledge. His explanations are well thought out, and make perfect sense out of what can be a complex subject. He has obviously spent a lot of time crafting the words to ensure you get the picture. I've had many "ah-ha!" moments reading this book, where something came together and clicked in my mind - even after reading many other explanations elsewhere.

There are a few features and modules mentioned which are available only in the upcoming Drupal 4.7 (which is currently available in a beta test version, and working quite well just as it is), but it would have made no sense to publish a new book that only covers older features when the new version is literally weeks away.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in learning Drupal.

Like Having A Guru Watching Over Your Shoulder
When I picked up this book I knew what phpBB was (my main reason for getting the book), but the other two applications were foreign to me. So, let me start off by briefly pointing out what each application is and does:
- Drupal is a CMS, content management system, (think Wikipedia) that allows users to input and update information
- phpBB is bulletin board software (very much like Invision or Jolt from surface appearances)
- WordPress is blogging software (do I really need to say more after 2005, the year of the Blog)

The publisher has chosen to group what amounts to three separate books on three open source applications together based upon the 'community' aspects that they engender, allowing groups of users to come together to post, comment and counter-comment.

The book is effectively a collected user manual for these three applications, but that does not really go far enough. Yes, the material for each is available online, but this book collects the documentation together in a user friendly manner. Anyone that has tried to install and operate a complex piece of software based upon the canned manuals can appreciate the complexity involved. Using this book is essentially like having an experienced guru looking over your shoulder offering advice as you go through the process. This can be the difference between 30-60 minutes of simple work and 5-6 hours of confusion, frustration and ranting.

Add to this the advice on configuration and usage/management for avoiding pitfalls and achieving best case results, and this book can pay for itself in no time (I bill at $50 an hour and consider my personal time even more valuable).

Bottom line, if you want to keep users on your site (i.e. not farm out these services), and want to use a CMS, bBoard, or Blog using open source software, it is worth your time to check out these options. If you then decide to use one of them, this book can save you a chunk of time and frustration.
P-)

Useful comparison, cursory treatment of each topic
This book was useful for comparing and contrasting Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress. Before reading this book, one might have reasonably wanted to use Drupal where phpBB would have been a better and simpler choice, or tried to use phpBB when something with the power of Drupal was required. Having all three technologies in one place was useful in doing the compare/contrast required to make the decision.

However, the treatment of each technology is cursory. Having used the book to decide that I needed to use Drupal for my site, I did not find the book sufficiently detailed for me to do that successfully. The description of the Book module, which the author correctly describes as one of the most useful in Drupal, warranted only three pages. There's not much as far as best practices or warnings about what not to do, so it's hard to use the book as the sole source of information about building your site.

It's useful for its ability to help choose between apparently similar technologies, and it outlines the capabilities of each in a way that may make it easier to use a more detailed book on one of these three topics. However, you will need at least one more book.