Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress Review

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Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress ReviewWhen I picked up this book I knew what phpBB was (my main reason for getting the book), but the other two applications were foreign to me. So, let me start off by briefly pointing out what each application is and does:
- Drupal is a CMS, content management system, (think Wikipedia) that allows users to input and update information
- phpBB is bulletin board software (very much like Invision or Jolt from surface appearances)
- WordPress is blogging software (do I really need to say more after 2005, the year of the Blog)
The publisher has chosen to group what amounts to three separate books on three open source applications together based upon the 'community' aspects that they engender, allowing groups of users to come together to post, comment and counter-comment.
The book is effectively a collected user manual for these three applications, but that does not really go far enough. Yes, the material for each is available online, but this book collects the documentation together in a user friendly manner. Anyone that has tried to install and operate a complex piece of software based upon the canned manuals can appreciate the complexity involved. Using this book is essentially like having an experienced guru looking over your shoulder offering advice as you go through the process. This can be the difference between 30-60 minutes of simple work and 5-6 hours of confusion, frustration and ranting.
Add to this the advice on configuration and usage/management for avoiding pitfalls and achieving best case results, and this book can pay for itself in no time (I bill at $50 an hour and consider my personal time even more valuable).
Bottom line, if you want to keep users on your site (i.e. not farm out these services), and want to use a CMS, bBoard, or Blog using open source software, it is worth your time to check out these options. If you then decide to use one of them, this book can save you a chunk of time and frustration.
P-)Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress OverviewWhether you want to build a community with a content management system, a bulletin board, or a blog, Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress is the authoritative guide using Open Source software. Drupal (http://www.drupal.org/) is a full content management system that allows you to create any type of web site you desire, from an eCommerce to a community-based site. With phpBB (http://www.phpbb.com/) you can set up a bulletin board or forum. And WordPress is fast becoming the software of choice for the exploding blog community. Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and Wordpress is authored by a team of experts, including Jared Smith, a long time support team member of the phpBBHacks.com web site who has been building sites with phpBB since the first beta releases, and Mike Little, the founder and a contributing developer of the WordPress project.

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Drupal 7 Module Development Review

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Drupal 7 Module Development Review(Full disclosure: The publisher of this book sent me a review copy)
This book will serve as a tremendously helpful introduction to Drupal programming for programmers. It does assume you know PHP, and warns you (or comforts you, depending) early on that there won't be much OOP here and there will be a lot of structured arrays. The chapters don't necessarily follow in order one to the next, and aren't explicitly linked one with another.
For programmers new to Drupal chapter one should be required reading. And while occasionally the book slips into "what's new" mode, for the most part the reader is considered a competent PHP coder but not necessarily someone fluent in Drupal programming.
The examples given throughout are mostly useful. One thing I hate about programming texts is when they show what the language/system can do with ridiculous examples. With the glaring exception of the Javascript chapter, this book does not stoop to such levels, instead giving real-world problems solved through the Drupal API.
The style of the book is nicely conversational. The overt humor is sparse, but at the same time you don't ever feel that you're sitting in a lecture hall. The authors seem quite well-versed in the material and aren't subjecting you to death-by-powerpoint-by-screenshot. They don't talk down to you, ever, guiding the reader through the API as a comrade. Even in the areas of security and best practice, when it would be easy to slip into browbeat mode, they resist, presenting facts instead of opinion and advice rather than orders.
The main problem I had with this book is that I feel there are parts missing. The book begins talking about how we'll use modern techniques, and mentions Drush, the Drupal shell, one of my favorite tools. And that's the last we'll here of it. Seriously. Even when the installation profile chapter says we can use profiles at the command line, we end up writing a command line PHP script instead of leveraging Drush. An oversight in the editing, perhaps, to mention it at all?
Also absent any real treatment is *contributing* rather than simply *developing*. A "10 minute git tutorial" appendix wouldn't have been out of line. There's no mention of how to be a good module maintainer, dealing with releases, submitting your module to drupal.org, or any such thing. While that's not necessarily within scope, such a discussion is noticeable in its absence, particularly when the community is perhaps the strongest thing about Drupal. Given the status of the authors as top-tier contributors, it's a curious omission.
There are some nitpicks, some spelling errors, wrong screenshots, and discussions of things (ie., drush) that just aren't there. No more, perhaps, than any other book of its size, and nothing that was too glaring or anything that would stop one in their tracks. We do occasionally slide away from coding standards (eg, after singing the praises of Doxygen comments earlier in the book, chapter seven contains no code comments at all), but it's nothing too big.
I was very happy to read through this book. It's well written by competent authors. It gets me excited to write some custom code of my own for Drupal 7. While there's not too much that will serve as a desk reference within the book (the authors are quick to point us to api.drupal.org, early and often), Drupal 7 Module Development is a worthy addition to the shelf and serves as a wonderful introduction to coding for Drupal.Drupal 7 Module Development OverviewThis book takes a hands-on, practical approach to software development. The authors, all professional Drupal developers and contributors to the Drupal project, provide accessible coding samples designed to exhibit not only the technical merits and abilities of Drupal, but also proper architectural and stylistic approaches to coding on one of the world's most popular content management systems. Every chapter provides fully functional code samples illustrating the APIs and strategies discussed in the chapter. With this foundation, developers can quickly build sophisticated tools on their own by making use of the strategies and techniques exemplified in this book. If you are a PHP developer or a Drupal user looking to dive into Drupal development then you will find this book an excellent introduction to coding within Drupal. Those with some Drupal experience will also find this an invaluable tool for updating their knowledge about the powerful new features of Drupal 7. Theme developers looking to extend their abilities will find this an accessible introduction to PHP coding within the Drupal environment. This book assumes that you are familiar with basic PHP programming, along with HTML and CSS. No experience with programming Drupal is required, although it is also a handy way for experienced Drupal developers to get up to speed with Drupal 7.

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