The Internet is arguably one of the most profound achievements in human history. It has become so pervasive in our lives that we hardly even notice it—except when it happens to be unavailable! It’s one of those things that make you sit back and wonder how people got along without it in the old days. Without the ability to surf the Internet to order groceries, do our banking, book flights and make travel arrangements, meet friends, meet partners, download music and videos, study, run businesses, trade shares, run campaigns, express views, share ideas, learn about other people… where would we be?
Fundamentally, in a world of so many people, where the sheer vastness of our societies is a hindrance to communication, the Internet has stepped up to the plate and brought everyone that little bit closer together. Utilizing a stunning array of technologies, spread out over the entire globe, the Internet has simply dropped the barriers of time and geographical distance to turn the entire world into a local community center.
Lately, the all-encompassing focus of commerce on the Internet has begun to shift slightly. Millions upon millions of people are waking up to the possibility of sharing their lives and experiences with others through the medium of weblogs (blogs for short). Others simply want an online presence to show off their work, art, or music. Still others have important causes and need the Internet to disseminate information or provide a meeting point for like-minded people. Whatever the demands, the Internet has to find a way to efficiently meet these needs or face being superseded by something else in the future.
What the Internet needs is something that makes it easy for people to do whatever it is they want without having to pour intellectual resources into understanding the technologies on which the Internet is based. What the Internet has got is precisely this—Drupal!
Drupal is what you need to use to build anything from a static homepage, to a fully-fledged, customizable, and interactive website in several languages, with tens of thousands of users all over the world. Assuming you fall somewhere between these two extremes, this book is what you need to guide you on your way.
This book will help cut down your learning time by providing precisely the information you need when you need it. It will help to reduce the trial and error associated with learning any new technology and provide you with a methodical and efficient learning process so that you become a knowledgeable and competent website creator and administrator.
Chapter 1 introduces you to the world of Drupal and looks at where Drupal comes from, where it’s going, and what it can offer you. Because it is important to understand the nature of the tasks that lie ahead, it also discusses how to plan and build your website, taking a sneak preview of the book’s demo website in the process. Finally, we scrutinize the Drupal community and learn how to make the most of Drupal as an organized, living entity and not just a piece of software.
Chapter 2 deals with how to get everything you need up and running on a development machine and also briefly looks at how all the requisite technologies gel together to produce your working Drupal site. Once everything is up and running, and after looking over some of the more common installation problems, the chapter presents a short tour of Drupal in order to give you an idea of what to expect.
Chapter 3 looks at the most general settings that all Drupal administrators need to contend with. Everything from determining your site’s name to dealing with the cache or file system settings gets treated here before we look at more focused and complex issues in the chapters to come.
Chapter 4 sees us adding functionality to the newly created site. The focus of this chapter is really on modules and how they can be added and enabled, and also how to obtain modules that are not part of the standard distribution. This chapter ends off with a discussion on how to control blocks.
Chapter 5 concerns itself with the topic of access control. Drupal has a sophisticated role-based access control system, which is fundamentally important for controlling how users access your site. This chapter will give you the information you need to implement whatever access controls you require.
Chapter 6 gets to the heart of the matter by beginning the book’s coverage on content. Working with content, what content types are available, administering content, and even a discourse on some of the more common content-related modules serve as a basis for moving to more advanced content-related matters that follow in the next chapter.
Chapter 7 gives you the edge when it comes to creating engaging and dynamic content. While this chapter doesn’t require you to be an expert in HTML, PHP, and CSS, it does introduce you to the basics and shows how, with a little knowledge, extremely powerful and professional content can be created. That’s only half the story, because later on it looks at categorization and how this particular feature of Drupal sets it apart from everything else out there.
Chapter 8 gives you a run down of how attractive interfaces are created in Drupal through the use of themes. As well as discussing briefly some of the considerations that must be taken into account when planning your website, it ends off by looking at how to make important modifications to your chosen theme.
Chapter 9 really adds the icing on the cake by looking at a host of more advanced topics. From creating flexible content types and generating revenue from ads, all the way through to building dynamic content using AJAX, you will find something to enhance your website and add that something special.
Chapter 10 takes a pragmatic look at the types of tasks you will need to be proficient in so as to successfully run and maintain a Drupal site. Whether it’s setting up cron jobs or making backups of your database, everything you need to do throughout the course of running your newly created website will be covered here.
Appendix A deals with the all-important topic of deployment. Because all major work should be done on a copy of your website on a development machine, this appendix presents a sound process for taking the finished product and making it available for public consumption on your host site.