Book Review: Drupal 6 Ultimate Community Site (2nd Edition) Dorien Herremans

Drupal has always been known to be a great platform to build community sites and with the abundant of modules available to extend the core system, it really has made it so much easier now even for people with very little web development skills. For this reason, some group of people feel they should build their own local community site as opposed to using highly popular social network site like Facebook (groups). There are many reasons but i believe it comes down to the need for total control over the management and delegation of the site to serve a niche community.

This is not to say that it's not useful to integrate it with Facebook, you can use Facebook to promote and draw attention to your site (exposure). Either way, if you are planning to build your very own community site then you need guidance and good solid preparation work. This is where Dorien Herremans book - 'Drupal 6 Ultimate Community Site (2nd Edition)' really comes in handy. There have been many books aimed at teaching the novice to build a community site using Drupal but nothing comes close to be easy to follow as this book does.

This book offers a practical approach to building a community site and is well written for any beginners to follow. Its aim is to guide the reader through chapter by chapter choosing the right set of modules and sprinkle some code snippet to glue them together in building out sections of your site until a fully functional site emerges from your hard work. To accompany this, it offers mockup screens, hints and tips throughout each chapter. Not only that, it also tries to explain why it should be developed this way and not the other. What's more, you can download the whole site build to compare and discover how some of it was created by referring back to certain chapters. But this will cost you, however I often find this to be very useful. My advice would be to install a fully working site and then build your own while following each chapters and referring back to the install sites when things get a little muddled.

The beginning chapter kicks in like most Drupal books by explaining the installation and setup process right up to the second half of chapter 4 where it begins to introduce the reader to Panels module for creating user profile page. Panels is a complicated module for anyone new to Drupal but this books does well in explaining how to use it to further build your profile pages in a very concise way. It doesn't offer an in-depth explanation about Panels but that is fair. After all, Panels is one of these modules like Views that could have a whole book dedicated to it, and there is.

From here onwards Views, CCK and Panels are extensively used along with many other useful modules through out each chapter and for good reasons. These are large modules build to reduce the time and complicated tasks of manipulating with data on a code level as it offers a user interface (point and click) to accomplish the tasks that you would have normally needed to understand coding and sql queries. Most modules will harness the power of Views so this book like many other Drupal books will no doubt introduce the reader to it. It takes a bit of getting used to Views but highly recommended to understand it or at least know how to use it. Again, this book does not try to explain in details what Views is (like Panels, it'll cover a whole book) but on how to use the Views UI to configure and setup different site features.

Throughout the book, you learn how to add features that makes up all the useful features for a community site. For example gallery, knowledge sharing section, groups, forums, Gmap and including how to monetize on your site with Adsense.

The book finishes nicely by rounding off to a chapter called 'Tidying Up'. Like any development process, there is always a site review before go-live. During this site review you test and go through the site again to tweak or fix bugs. So this chapter offers further ways to enhance on the existing site build.

I thoroughly enjoyed learning and reading this book and would recommend anyone to consider it if they are looking into building their first community site. Of course, it's not going to show you how to build a Facebook site nor does it pretend to offer such solution. But once you have finish and manage to build the site, it really is an advanced site knowing that it didn't take too much or no knowledge of coding to accomplished it.

Like everything else there are always the cons. So what did i not like about this book. It's a difficult one to say, but one thing i didn't like and this is from experience is teaching the readers to paste code into a textarea. It is just bad practice in my opinion. The reason for that is these codes copied or typed into texture are stored in the database and as your site grows, and you're adding more functionality or features to it, you can easily get lost in the myriad of code snippets everywhere. However, i do understand some times it's the easiest and quickest solution. For a book like this that isn't aimed at coders or module developers, it makes a lot of sense to take the easy route as it's all about configuring a site and less development. But be warn about pasting code using texture as your site extends and grows, even for a coder to find his way around isn't going to be an easy task.

You can purchase this book at Drupalfun website