Book Image

Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, and Community Websites

By : David Mercer
Book Image

Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, and Community Websites

By: David Mercer

Overview of this book

<p>Drupal is one of the most popular content management systems on the internet. Based on PHP/MySQL, its power and flexibility combined with its exceptional design mean it is already on the way to becoming the de facto standard for CMS Websites. Drupal’s modular design and structured source code make it both highly flexible and easily extended and modified. Drupal is extremely scalable, making it ideal for both a simple personal website as well as an industrial strength commercial or institutional web presence.<br /> <br /> Drupal is a model open source project in that it has a large, friendly community of people who contribute to the project in various ways.&nbsp; Drupal is not only free and easy to use, but this community provides on going mutual support.<br /> <br /> Drupal’s power means choosing an initial pathway can be daunting. The flexibility and power of its content management features mean the right approach needs to be taken.&nbsp; This book takes you from initial set up through site design and creation in a series of carefully structured steps. While there are a few advanced topics that are beyond the scope of the book, all of the core stages of creating a website using Drupal are covered in detail.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Drupal
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Summary


With the general configuration tasks out of the way, we knuckled down to the all important topic of adding functionality and organizing it on the site. This is one of the most important tasks you will undertake during the development phase. Selecting and implementing the right functionality is a subtle task, but hopefully you found that Drupal makes it quite easy to implement once you have made up your mind about what goes where.

As well as this, we got a taste of what it's like to have an entire development community to draw from, when we downloaded and installed a contribution module. Contribution modules are an invaluable resource for extending the functionality of a site. This valuable facility comes with the express warning that you need to safeguard the security of your site by making backups before implementing any changes.

Drupal's power and elegance shone through brightly when we talked about how easy it is to customize the site's menu and navigation. Having a powerful tool...