Drupal User’s Guide: Building and Administering a Successful Drupal-Powered Web Site

Finally, Drupal Made Easy: A Step-By-Step Guide from Planning to Finished Site

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!

Table of Contents

Part I: Quick Start
Chapter 1 Introduction to Drupal
Chapter 2 Installing Drupal
Chapter 3 Drupal Administration
Chapter 4 Site Recipe: Micro Web Site

Part II: Planning
Chapter 5 Site Goals
Chapter 6 Human-Friendly Web Sites
Chapter 7 Information Architecture
Chapter 8 Design for Drupal

Part III: Case Studies
Chapter 9 Community Site
Chapter 10 Business Directory

Part IV: Build Anything
Chapter 11 Core and Contributed Modules
Chapter 12 Working with Content Types
Chapter 13 Lists of Content
Chapter 14 Recipes

Part V: Extending Drupal
Chapter 15 Theming
Chapter 16 Search Engine Optimization
Chapter 17 Accessibility

Appendix A: Sample User Survey
Appendix B: Preparing Your Development Environment
Appendix C: Advanced Installation of Drupal
Appendix D: CSS Grid Frameworks
Appendix E: Domicile Theme Files
Appendix F: Web Accessibility Guidelines