Drupal User's Guide: Building and Administering a Successful Drupal-Powered Web Site, Rough Cuts

Description

This is the Rough Cut version of the printed book.

The open source content management system Drupal offers amazing flexibility, sophistication, and power. The catch? Many first-time users find it difficult to get started, and most Drupal books don’t help with the initial stages. Drupal™ User’s Guide is different: easy to use, fun to read, practical, and complete!

Long-time Drupal site developer Emma Jane Hogbin guides you through every step of building sites with Drupal, from installation and site planning through launching your first site. Drawing on her experience teaching thousands of beginners, she covers both Drupal and Web design tasks, showing exactly how they fit together.

Drupal™ User’s Guide shows how to use Drupal 7’s newest improvements to build more modern, manageable sites for any business or organization. Hogbin covers crucial topics other Drupal books ignore, including search engine optimization and accessibility.

• Walk through installing Drupal on Mac OS X and Linux Web servers
• Get comfortable with Drupal 7’s new administrative interface
• Build a basic site in minutes
• Create S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely) site goals
• Audit your existing content so you can make the most of it
• Explore, choose, and customize Drupal themes
• Walk through building a community site with private discussion area
• Build a complete business association directory site
• Use Web forms to capture and display any kind of content
• Take advantage of Drupal’s powerful Views module
• Choose the right Drupal and third-party modules to build virtually any site
• Optimize your site for Google and other search engines
• Use advanced techniques to improve your visitors’ experiences

If you want to create great sites with Drupal–with no hassle, no confusion, and no degree in computer science–this is the book for you!

Sample Content

Table of Contents

Preface xxi

Acknowledgments xxv

About the Author xxvii

Part I: Quick Start 1

Chapter 1: Introduction to Drupal 3

About Drupal 3

Online Content Management 5

How Pages Are Built 5

Types of Web Sites 7

Summary 16

Chapter 2: Installing Drupal 17

Hosting Your Web Site on the Internet 17

Installing Drupal 20

Summary 32

Chapter 3: Drupal Administration 33

Overview 33

Configuration 38

Administrative Reports 43

Help 44

Summary 46

Chapter 4: Site Recipe: Micro Web Site 47

Web Site Basics 47

Basic Pages 49

Creating Front-Page Articles 52

In-Site Searching 57

RSS Settings 57

Customizing Your Site’s Design 58

Summary 60

Part II: Planning 61

Chapter 5: Site Goals 63

Defining and Designing Success 64

SMART Site Goals 64

Your Competition 72

Summary 74

Chapter 6: Human-Friendly Web Sites 77

Defining Your Audience 77

User Scenarios 82

Technical Profiles and Minimum System Requirements 84

Summary 86

Chapter 7: Information Architecture 87

Information Architecture 87

Defining Content Types 88

Organizing Content 93

Conveying Content Structure 100

Testing the Organizational Structure 105

Summary 105

Chapter 8: Design for Drupal 107

Planning Your Page Layout 107

Embellishments 119

Design Resources for the Graphically Challenged 124

Test Your Design Structure 126

Summary 126

Part III: Case Studies 129

Chapter 9: Community Site 131

Site Profile 131

Basic Configuration 134

Configure Modules 137

Customizing the Display 151

Summary 166

Chapter 10: Business Directory 167

Planning the Site 167

Basic Configuration 168

Contributed Modules 174

Views for Recent Content 176

Business Directory 184

Summary 194

Updates

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