Drupal User's Guide: Building and Administering a Successful Drupal-Powered Web 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!

The easy, practical, step-by-step guide to building great sites with Drupal 7... the perfect solution for Drupal's notorious learning curve!

The free, open source Drupal content management system offers enormous flexibility, sophistication, and power - but, for most users, it also presents a steep and difficult learning curve. Most Drupal guidebooks don't help: either they're too technical, too daunting, or too narrowly targeted. This is a Drupal book for "the rest of us." Drupal User's Guide is easy to use, fun to read, and complete. Long-time Drupal site developer Emma Jane Hogbin guides readers through every step of building web sites with Drupal 7, from planning through going live and maintaining content. Hogbin covers both Drupal tasks and "web design" tasks, showing how they fit together. She also "humanizes" Drupal with plenty of interviews, case studies and real-life examples from the worldwide Drupal community. Readers will learn how to: 1. Evaluate, install, and deploy Drupal and the third-party modules they need to get the job done 2. Smoothly handle every step of the web design life cycle 3. Import and manage content of all kinds 4. Administer Drupal and implement efficient content management workflows 5. Use Drupal to build sites that are optimized for search engines 6. Meet today's accessibility standards, including Section 508 This is the Drupal book thousands of users and potential users have been searching for - everything they need to overcome Drupal's notorious learning curve, and begin taking advantage of its immense power.

Part 1. Evaluate: Describe the Problem You Want To Solve

1. Market Analysis: Determining Real Need within Your Niche

2. Interaction Design: Scenarios, User Profiles

Part 2. Plan: Prescribe a Solution

3. Web Site Design: Grids, Graphics and Typography

4. Content Management: Assembling Content

5. Drupal Modules: Finding Modules That Solve Your Problem

Part 3. Build: Install and Deploy Drupal

6. Installing Drupal and Its Modules: One-Click Installs; DIY Installation

7. Creating the Framework: CCK, Regions, Blocks, Menus

8: Decorating the Framework: Theming

9. Migrating To Drupal: Importing Content from An Existing Site

10. Search Engine Optimization: Content, Page Structure

11. Web Accessibility: Section 508, W3C

Part 4. Maintenance: Keep Your Site Up-To-Date

12. Content Management

13. Working with Workflows

14. Drupal Administration

15. User Management