[Packt] Publishing sent me a copy of "Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6" to present my review. It took me long time to digest the complete edition from the start till end.
The author - Mr David Mercer is well known for helping out beginners to take up their learning path in right way.
This latest edition is well suited to assist the beginner & the intermediate developers in many ways. It neither teaches you PHP/MySQL nor CSS. It gives you a generic walkthrough of the power of Drupal briefing about how a non-technical person can learn using it & managing his web application.
Basically the reader is expected to have a basic knowledge of using a web browser & this books teaches you everything right from setting up your local development environment.
With the help of this book Mercer gives us a chance to peep into his knowledge base & gain some critical tips in simpler ways. He makes the learner to land in a safer learning zone boosting his interest.
The complete book is divided into ten chapters:
Chapter 1: Author starts the journey of learning drupal by presenting the introductory concepts here. It starts presenting the overview, taking you over a walkthrough of drupal's features, its uses, how to plan your application, Drupal's community & many more.
Chapter 2: This guides the reader in setting up local development environment, basic configuration options along with the issues & their solutions which he/she may face during these activities. It also presents an overall guidance of the software.
Chapter 3: It covers about the contributed modules. While major portions talks about the unavailability of modules porting from ver 5 to ver 6 it guides you about the usage of all the basic modules of drupal. It guides you in adding 3rd party modules, working with blocks, menus, forums etc.
Chapter 4: This teaches you about how a person can manage his CMS based website through the web interface.
Chapter 5: This talks about the complete user management, access levels, permissions along with roles.
Chapter 6: This chapter teaches you everything related to the basic level content management of your website. Content is the base key for any successfull website. So, how would you control & manage that content will be covered here.
Chapter 7: This lands on few advanced skills. It teaches you advanced level content management tricks like content categorisation, tagging, feature rich contents in various input formats like full HTML, PHP etc
Chapter 8: Now landing on the UI part this chapter guides you about themes, drupal's anatomy of handling the designs & developing custom templates.
Chapter 9: Takes you through enhancing concepts of JQuery, caching, content translation, actions & triggers.
Chapter 10: Covers the necessary knowledge to maintain your developed website.
This book basically guides you in developing your own CMS based website & maintain it. I enjoyed my journey of reading this book & also have recommended it to many others who are entirely new to the world of DRUPAL.
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