Review: Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6

The name Drupal is Dutch for 'droplet', hence the water droplet icon found on hundreds of websites. Behind that icon is a content management system that has evolved over the years from a basic content management system into what has been called a "Swiss-army knife of web software". As that statement might lead you to think, Drupal does have a reputation for having a steep learning curve, but probably not that much more than other content management systems become when you step outside the defaults.

Like many such systems it employs some kind of system of blocks of content that are skinned with a theme. How easy it is to make a site your own is what sets one content system apart from another. To see what's possible, take a look at the Drupal.org website and one for a Toronto hot-spot: TheDrakeHotel.ca. All of these are Drupal sites, so it gives you some idea what's possible.

If you're familiar with the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern used by many frameworks then you could think of the blocks as the view and the modules are the Model and Controller. That said, this book is not about programming with the Drupal API, it's for the user who has picked this system because they want to
Briefly, the chapters cover an introduction to Drupal, covering it's history, the community and it's features followed by a bit on planning a site. Getting set up is covered in the next chapter. The book takes the reader through setting up a development environment, based on the Apache2Triad package, through they mention that XAMPP could also be used-- that's the system I used when following this book. Afterwards comes installing Drupal and fixing some common installing problems. Then how to set up an administrator account and create your first page.

Chapter three covers the basics of the Drupal functionality: blocks and modules. You lean how to install new modules, configure some common ones including forum and comments and search; then you learn a bit about blocks, including how to create a simple one of your own. Like many content systems, Drupal's layout is based around blocks of screen space that are filled by modules.

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Courtesy : http://yyztech.ca