You can use the Drupal 7 content management framework to build a small business website rapidly. You may add blogs; images and image galleries; maps, e-commerce and shopping carts; social application integration including Twitter and Flickr, 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 using the new Drupal Commerce module so you can sell your products online. You'll add YouTube videos, Google maps, and Flickr-based photos 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 over time so you can market your business successfully with a professional, flexible and optimized website.
Chapter 1, Planning our Site and Setting up Drupal: In this chapter we plan for and map out our website and its content with the Drupal content management system as the backbone. We look at the advantages and benefits of using Drupal to build our site. We install Drupal and set up the website's initial basic configuration.
Chapter 2, Creating the Artisan Bakers Collective Website: In this chapter we continue configuring Drupal and learning how to run a cron task and check the Drupal status report. We enable clean URLs, and add some Basic Page and Article content to our site. We add users to our site and configure basic user permissions. We discuss the various types of home pages we can configure using Drupal. We configure path aliases, set up navigation menus, tweak the order of our menu items, enable core modules; and install contributed Drupal modules.
Chapter 3, Adding Products and Services: In this chapter we build a custom content type using Drupal. We configure the content type and add custom fields to the content type in order to post specific data to our site using the content type's form. We install and configure the Date module to handle adding fields to our content type to collect date and time information. We set up some basic access control to our content type. We also build some taxonomy vocabularies and add tags to our site.
Chapter 4, Interacting with Customers and Visitors: In this chapter we add user roles to the site and extend the user signup form to add fields to collect user profile data. We enable and configure the Comments module and create some specific comments-based actions and triggers.
Chapter 5, Creating a Company Blog: In this chapter we enable and configure the Blog module. We add some blog posts and set up a moderation system for our blogging. We learn how to configure advanced actions in Drupal. We add easy access methods for our site visitors to be able to get to and read our blog posts by enabling blocks that show recent blog posts. We add RSS feeds to our site's blog. We learn how to aggregate content from other websites using the powerful Drupal Aggregation and Feeds modules.
Chapter 6, Newsletters and Calendars: In this chapter we set up e-newsletters on our site using the Simplenews module. We learn how to add a Newsletter and send it via e-mail to our site visitors. We set up a subscription service for the newsletters. We add an Event content type to the site and create a visual calendar of our events using the Calendar module.
Chapter 7, Sharing and Consuming with YouTube, Flickr, Google Maps, and Twitter: In this chapter we learn how to embed YouTube videos on our site. We install and configure the Flickr module to add Flickr photosets and photos to our site via a web service API. We add Google Maps to our site and also learn how to tweet our site content automatically to our Twitter account.
Chapter 8, Freebies and Downloads: In this chapter we learn how to post files including PDFs to our site's content so our site visitors can easily download these files. We configure both public and private file systems on our site. We install and configure the Print module which adds printer-friendly versions of our site's pages, e-mail to friend functionality, and PDF versions of our site's content. We install the dompdf library so we can generate PDFs of our site's content automatically.
Chapter 9, Online Orders and Payments: In this chapter we install and configure the new Drupal 7.x Commerce module to add e-commerce functionality and a shopping cart to our site.
Chapter 10, Image Galleries and Slideshows: In this chapter we use the Views and Views Slideshow modules to set up image galleries and dynamic slideshows of our image collections.
Chapter 11, Maintaining and Optimizing your Drupal Site: In this final chapter we discuss best practices for maintaining and optimizing our Drupal website and its MySQL database. This includes discussions of Drupal performance and some tips for getting the best performance and optimization out of your website.
This book is for anyone who wants to learn how to set up a website quickly for their business using the super powerful Drupal open source content management software.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: " Let's tweak the label to read Description of Item."
A block of code is set as follows:
[default] exten => s,1,Dial(Zap/1|30) exten => s,2,Voicemail(u100) exten => s,102,Voicemail(b100) exten => i,1,Voicemail(s0)
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
[default]
exten => s,1,Dial(Zap/1|30)
exten => s,2,Voicemail(u100)
exten => s,102,Voicemail(b100)
exten => i,1,Voicemail(s0)New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "You'll see a message stating that Cron ran successfully:".
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