Building Powerful And Robust Websites With Drupal 6

Build your own professional blog, forum, portal or community website with Drupal 6

Drupal is a hugely popular and widely celebrated open-source Content Management System that is day-by-day becoming the first choice of people for building blogs and other websites. Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the father of the Internet), Hillary Clinton, and many others utilize Drupal to fulfil their online requirements.

Drupal is an elegantly designed, well-supported and flexible platform that anyone can use in order to create their own website. With such a powerful tool at your fingertips there is no longer any need to pay professionals to design a site when you can do the same job yourself absolutely free. All it takes is a bit of practice!

This book meets the booming demand for well presented, clear, concise, and above all practical information on how to move from knowing you want a website all the way through to designing and building it like a pro, and finally successfully managing and maintaining it.

Experienced technical author David Mercer expertly guides the reader through all the stages of building a professional website in a plain, articulate manner. Aimed in particular at beginners to Drupal, this book will allow readers to advance rapidly up the learning curve to the point where they can tackle any problem with confidence.

What you will learn from this book

• Plan and consider various design aspects of your site
  
• Install, set up, and configure a Drupal development machine
  
• Find your way around the vast array of Drupal settings with ease
  
• Add and work with modules to enhance your website’s functionality
  
• Control and manage your site's content
  
• Deal with security issues, users, and access control
  
• Implement a customized interface for your website
  
• Add powerful new features and learn advanced techniques
  
• Deploy, manage, and maintain your website

Who this book is written for
This book is for people with little or no experience in website design, people who are not familiar with PHP, MySQL or HTML, and above all people with little to no experience in using Drupal. Even intermediate Drupal users will find this book of interest although it is specifically aimed at pushing beginners up the learning curve.

About the Author
David Mercer was born in August 1976 in Harare, Zimbabwe. Having always had a strong interest in science, David came into regular contact with computers at university where he graduated cum laude with majors in applied math and math (although he minored in computer science).

As a programmer and professional writer who has been writing both code and books for about nine years, he has worked on a number of well known titles, in various capacities, on a wide variety of topics. His books have sold tens of thousands of copies and have been translated into over 6 different languages to date.

David finds that the challenges arising from the dichotomous relationship between the science (and art) of software programming and the art (and science) of writing is what keeps his interest in producing books piqued. He will no doubt continue to write professionally in the future.

David balances his time between programming, reviewing, writing, and contributing to interesting web-based projects such as RankTracer and LinkDoozer. When he isn't working (which isn't that often) he enjoys playing guitar (generally on stage and unrehearsed) and getting involved in outdoor activities ranging from touch rugby and golf to water skiing and snowboarding. Visit RankTracer or find him on LinkDoozer where he is generally lurking.