Book Image

Drupal 7 Business Solutions

Book Image

Drupal 7 Business Solutions

Overview of this book

You can use the Drupal 7 content management system to build a small business website quickly. You may add blogs, images, maps, e-commerce, social application integration, and more to your site to connect with your customers and make more money from your business. Drupal 7 Business Solutions will give you hands-on practical tutorials on how to build a rich and dynamic website for your business quickly using one of the most popular tools in open source. You'll start by adding blogs and images to your website. Then you'll learn how to add a VIP section to your site so that you can give your logged in users special discounts and other VIP freebies. Next, you will learn to send your customers e-mail newsletters and show them a dynamic events calendar. The book will then teach you to add e-commerce to your site so you can sell your products online. You'll add YouTube videos and Google maps to help enhance your business site. You will then learn to incorporate feedback mechanisms for your customers. The book also explains how to maintain your site, upgrade it, and continue adding dynamic content to it.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Drupal 7 Business Solutions
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgment
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 1. Planning our Site and Setting up Drupal

Although several books have been written about Drupal 7, most have been written for developers to help them program sites using Drupal coding standards, enhance sites by using custom modules, and change the appearance of Drupal sites by using themes. In this book, we take a different approach. Throughout the book, we will develop a website for a (fictional) business and meet the needs of this business.

We have included an explanation of all the key features in Drupal that most small-to-medium-sized businesses would want to use on their sites. A thorough step-by-step description of how to integrate each piece of functionality into your website is included, along with an explanation of the business need that is being satisfied by using the functionality.

After reading this book, you will be able to adapt the techniques used in this book to either develop a site for your company on your own, or work with a development firm to create a website that truly meets the needs of your business.

In this chapter, we will introduce our client, the Artisan Bakers Collective and discuss their plans to build a website. We will also introduce Drupal 7 and describe why it is a good fit for our client's website.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Plans for the Artisan Bakers Collective website

  • The advantages and disadvantages of simple, static web pages

  • Advantages and disadvantages of customized PHP and MySQL sites

  • Deciding on Drupal for building the website

  • Getting started with Drupal