The name Drupal is Dutch for ‘droplet’, hence the water droplet icon found on hundreds of websites. Behind that icon is a content management system that has evolved over the years from a basic content management system into what has been called a “Swiss-army knife of web software”. As that statement might lead you to think, Drupal does have a reputation for having a steep learning curve, but probably not that much more than other content management systems become when you step outside the defaults.

Like many such systems it employs some kind of system of blocks of content that are skinned with a theme. How easy it is to make a site your own is what sets one content system apart from another. To see what’s possible, take a look at the Drupal.org website and one for a Toronto hot-spot: TheDrakeHotel.ca. All of these are Drupal sites, so it gives you some idea what’s possible.

If you’re familiar with the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern used by many frameworks then you could think of the blocks as the view and the modules are the Model and Controller. That said, this book is not about programming with the Drupal API, it’s for the user who has picked this system because they want to avoid that.

Briefly, the chapters cover an introduction to Drupal, covering it’s history, the community and it’s features followed by a bit on planning a site. Getting set up is covered in the next chapter. The book takes the reader through setting up a development environment, based on the Apache2Triad package, through they mention that XAMPP could also be used– that’s the system I used when following this book. Afterwards comes installing Drupal and fixing some common installing problems. Then how to set up an administrator account and create your first page.

Chapter three covers the basics of the Drupal functionality: blocks and modules. You lean how to install new modules, configure some common ones including forum and comments and search; then you learn a bit about blocks, including how to create a simple one of your own. Like many content systems, Drupal’s layout is based around blocks of screen space that are filled by modules.

Chapter four is on site configuration. Here you lean how to set up logging, error reporting and some site maintenance functions– basically all the things you need to know to keep your website running. Related, chapter 5 the reader is given an overview of access control. This covers the built-in roles, configuring new ones and managing users and user settings. You also learn here about Drupal’s more advanced features, such as its spam prevention tools.

Chapters six and seven cover creating content. The first chapter covers the types of content, working with content and the content related modules including the blog, forum, comments and page modules. Chapter seven introduces the Content Creation Kit (CCK) and taxonomy. The CCK allows the user to create their own content types without programming while the taxonomy system allows for categorizing your content several ways. Chapter eight teaches you how to go about theming Drupal. Here the reader learns about planning a theme, customizing an existing theme via the CSS files to create a new theme.

Chapter nine covers some of the more advanced features of Drupal: localization, caching, throttling, jQuery.

Chapter 10 is all about managing your website. This covers doing backups, setting up cron jobs, updating your website as well as updating Drupal and its and modules. Finally, the appendix covers deploying your new site. This covers all the usual points about checking your host out, transferring files and the database, then testing it out.

With the exception of chapter seven, I didn’t find too much in Drupal that complicated to follow. The book is quite easy to read, but I hoped there might have been more coverage of theming– there’s a lot of websites out there that scream “Drupal!” from a kilo away and making your own layout is one way to make a website your own. At approximately 350 pages, coverage of some of the more advanced topics is brief, but you’ll get a good overview of what’s possible with this system. The layout is black and white, but has plenty of screen-shots and is cleanly laid-out, so it’s quite comfortable to read. There aren’t a lot of current books on Drupal on the market, so fortunately, for the reader looking to get started, this is a good one.

Packt Publishing has, since 2004, made a name for themselves specializing in books on open source projects and this is their latest book on Drupal. As well as sponsoring an award for open source CMS, Packt has (as far as I know) a unique way of “giving back”; for each copy of a book sold, they donate a portion of the sale back to the project, hopefully ensuring the continuing development of a popular project.