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Book Review: Drupal 6 Content Administration
My publishers, Packt, have provided me with three new Drupal related books to review. Today, I'm reviewing the first of these books, Drupal 6 Content Administration by J. Ayen Green.
Drupal 6 Content Administration is designed to help you "Maintain, add, and edit the content of your Drupal site with ease", so let's take a look and see if it does that. It is aimed to readers involved in the day-to-day running of a Drupal site, but who aren't well-versed in Drupal or web technologies. I'll give my opinion on this aim, toward the end of this review.
Drupal 6 Content Administration
Let's look through what the book covers.
Book Structure
The book is broken down into eight chapters and two appendices:
- Chapter 1: The Grand Tour
- Chapter 2: Content Creation
- Chapter 3: Content Seasoning
- Chapter 4: Advanced Content Editing
- Chapter 5: Making Content Findable
- Chapter 6: Rich Content Types
- Chapter 7: Supporting an Editorial Team
- Chapter 8: Offline Content Creation
- Appendix A: Installing Drupal
- Appendix B: Where to Find...
The first thing which struck me about this book, is that it is quite short, only 179 pages, however, despite being short, it gets across everything it needs to, and it does it well.
The Grand Tour
The first chapter gives a general introduction into Drupal, CMS's, the book, and the way Drupal is organised. When discussing more about the book, it also explains how it is designed to be a quick start guide. Its tour of Drupal is very useful, especially to new users of the CMS, going through the different aspects of the front end such as the header, content, navigation and their purposes, and with the backend focusing primarily on aspects which are relevant to that of an administrator whose role is content centric - leaving out configuration and reporting.
Content Creation
Next we look into creating content with Drupal, while Drupal is a CMS and makes it easy to add and manage content (as Green mentions), it is very powerful with lots of additional options available to the user - which this chapter starts to go into. One of the first things the chapter covers is some basic terminology, which is vital to a new Drupal user, but as well as going into the terminology it also agrees on some terminology to use with the reader when referring to certain things which makes it clearer which type of content is being discussed.
We then go through the different types of content available in Drupal, what they are, how they are different - something which isn't obvious from reading the inline notes within Drupal itself. The chapter also looks at the Rich Text Editor, something which, most people would assume the reader knew about, however since this book focuses on those without web technology knowledge - this is a very useful point to cover. The chapter ends with a brief discussion on permissions within Drupal related to what we have done in the chapter, which is a useful insight to Drupal's less content centric features.
Content Seasoning
Most websites make use of teaser text and read more links, allowing the content author to post teasers on pages enticing the reader to continue reading the content in more detail on another page - this is covered by the first half of the chapter, before discussing linking, images and embedding other media within a page.
Links and most of the other media were covered fairly well, with a few minor issues, when embedding audio in a page, it assumes that the site is already setup (with suitable modules) to support this - however this is discussed after the appropriate instructions, which could confuse the reader (I know I was confused!). It also seemed to miss out how to link to another page within the CMS, mainly focusing on linking to images, files and external links. When I've used Drupal for client projects, I've often added video and audio as its own content type - making it easy to group and manage such content - this not only allows the user of the website to play the audio/video, but also options to download it, and shows how many times the content has been downloaded or played. None the less, still a good overview of working with different media within content.
Advanced Content Editing
As the title indicates, this chapter covers more advanced content editing, more specifically using HTML, CSS, PHP, a content include file as well as looking at revisions of content within Drupal. Despite being an advanced chapter, it is still very valuable even for users with little technical knowledge, the HTML covered focuses on tables and CSS which is a really useful addition - it goes on to cover the text editors table features, as well as some simple PHP which can be added to help style the table. Although mixing PHP with content isn't the best way to do things, it does show some very simple tricks, which even an inexperienced user can do which enhance the page, I even learned that you can include PHP files within a Drupal node - something I wasn't aware of. Finally the chapter looks at revisions, when you edit content within Drupal, it stores it as a new version, which makes it easy to roll back to previous versions. The Diff module is mentioned (another useful thing I wasn't aware of) which allows the administrator to compare different versions of content.
Making Content Finable
Taxonomy is one of the key features of Drupal, providing a robust way to organise and categorise content. From this, tag-clouds are then discussed, which using taxonomy, provide a central area to view content based on popular categories. The path setting for content is also mentioned, though I think this would be better combined with a recommendation of the Path Auto module, to automatically create paths for nodes. Finally, the chapter covers searching, enabling the search box and manually indexing content so they appear in the results. Most of the content from this chapter isn't something a content manager would need to use on a day to day basis (though some bits are), it does serve a useful reference and gives the reader further understanding into Drupal.
Rich Content Types
Although the title isn't particularly suited to this chapter, this chapter goes into blocks, views and blogs. This chapter covers some very useful hints and tips, such as how to determine the width of blocks, as well as going into detail about using the views module (which from experience, is one of the most difficult modules to understand) in an easy to understand way.
Supporting an Editorial Team
This chapter was a real hidden gem, going through the process of creating an editorial team, with different roles and permissions. I can imagine this being really useful for content managers using this book, who are not technical, and not the person who set the site up, who at somepoint need to setup access for new staff members if their site expands. It could also be used for the more technical, as a quick reference, and the list of example roles give some great food for thought when creating your own editorial team.
Offline Content Creation
Not everyone finds creating content directly into a web based interface the easiest, this is especially the case if you are in a situation where Internet access is intermittent. This chapter shows how to use Microsoft Word to draft content, and then publish to the site (something which I myself covered in Drupal 6 Social Networking) and also emailing content to the site (very useful for non-technical users!).
The Appendicies
Installing Drupal
A nice supplimentary appendix going through the installation process, a nice little reference. I do feel however, that this chapter could have benefited from installing a WAMP server, so a content editor could install their own local copy of Drupal for experimentation.
Where to Find...
Links to useful websites and resources.
What did I think?
Overall, I thought this was a great book, really useful particularly for beginners to Drupal. Next time I'm doing a training session for a Drupal based website, I'll be ordering copies of this book to give out as the notes.
Rating
I'd give this book a rating of 8/10, without the (fairly minor) issues I've mentioned, I think this would have been a 10. A great book, I'd certainly recommend it the next time you setup Drupal for a client, or if you are new to Drupal and need to manage its content.
Suitability for target audience: 9/10
Suitability for more advanced / experienced users: 6 / 10 (some useful tips, and a few bits aimed at more advanced readers)
Value for money: 9 / 10 - it's a short book, but a good one!
Full Disclosure
Just to point out, I am a published author with Packt, who published this book, and was given a free copy of this book to read and review from them.
Posted by Michael on 16th Dec 2009 at 11:11
