Drupal 6 Social Networking

One strong point of the Drupal content management system is its social networking features. This book Drupal 6 Social Networking by Michael Peacock focuses on these aspects of Drupal.

The great thing about this book is that the author uses a practical example of building hypothetical social network site for dinosaur owners.
As you read through the book chapter by chapter, you will learn the process of building a social network website from concept to deployment based on this example. Source code for this example site can be downloaded from the link provided in the book.

The book starts with installing and configuring Drupal. Appendix has guidance for setting up WAMPServer so that you can have a local development environment on your computer.

Next, the book takes the reader through the terminology and concept of using Drupal. Hence, no prior experience with content management system is needed.

The book covers how to enable and work with various Drupal modules that would be relevant in a social network site. These modules includes core modules such as Aggregator, Blog, Book, Comment, Forum, and Poll. There are also third-party modules such as User Relationships, Activity, Guestbook, Organic Groups, Messaging, Contact, and more. These added modules enable your users to form groups, create friends list, and message each other.

In a social network, users are going to be a major aspect of the site. Therefore a whole chapter is devoted to user roles, permissions, Gravatars, and Open ID.

Chapter 7 provides a brief overview of what is involved in creating a custom module. Chapter 8 summarizes the concept of theming the look-and-feel of the site. 

Chapter 9 deals with hosting and security including the use of CAPTCHA and Mollom to combat spam. And because a social network site needs traffic, chapter 10 provides an intro into search engine marketing and promotion.

I haven't spoken about Chapter 6 of this book, because you can read chapter 6 "Communicating with Our Users" for yourself (except provided by courtesy of Packt Publishing).

Disclosure: Author of this review have received complimentary copy of book from publisher.

Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6

The book starts off explaining what Drupal has to offer and an introduction to the Drupal community. Author, David Mercer, will show you how to install Drupal as well as give you an overview of the technology and development environment. After installation, there are certain configuration steps that should be taken care of including setting up clean URLs, error pages, logging, site information, and more.

Drupal is a modular system and "modules" are the basic building blocks. Basic functionality of modules (including adding and configuring) as well as its relation to "blocks" is covered.

Chapter 5 is all about setting up "roles" and "permissions" of Drupal users. Chapter 6 covers creating content and the various content types that are available in Drupal including "book", "page", "story", and others. As you can see, Drupal administrators has a lot of power over the Drupal system and these are concepts that all Drupal administrators must know in order to manage the system.

No book on Drupal will be complete unless it covers the concept of "taxonomy". The taxonomy classification concept is what makes Drupal so powerful. Chapter 7 will explain to you the concepts of "taxonomy", "vocabulary", "tagging", "terms" and how they relate to each other.

Chapter 8 provides an introduction to modifying themes. Chapters 9 and 10 finish up with advanced topics that can become important in a production site. These concepts includes "throttling", "openid", "backup", "cron jobs", "caching", and others. Appendix A even has a deployment checklist for you.

Disclosure: Author of this review have received complimentary copy of book from publisher.

Drupal Essential Training

If you like to learn by watching, this book has a CD ROM containing 7 hours of training videos. You can preview some of the videos on lynda.com

Book covers Drupal from installation, configuration, and customization of Drupal sites.

Pro Drupal Development

This book is written by John K. VanDyke, a Drupal developer since 2004 who has written several Drupal modules. Forward of book written by Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal. The book is intended for developer creating and maintaining Drupal sites and who already are familiar with basic Drupal usage and how to bring up a fresh install of Drupal.

Learning Drupal 6 Module Development

Need to add custom functionality to your Drupal site? This book will show you how to develop your own Drupal modules. It is intended for PHP developers already familiar with Drupal but want to start creating their own module and functionality.

Selling Online with Drupal eCommerce

Drupal is not just a content management system; you can use it to build an online store. This book by Michael Peacock show you how.