What is Drupal? Why is Drupal? How do you Drupal? You'll find these answers and more in Using Drupal by Angela Byron and others from O'Reilly.
At its most fundamental, Drupal is a system that allow editors and writers to enter and articles and information and for users retrieve, read, and sometimes comment on that content. Most blogs are based on content management systems. Drupal can do blogs, but it can also scale up to publish on-line newspapers, store-fronts, and social communities.
With hundreds of extensions that extend its basic functionality, Drupal is an incredibly powerful system. There are image gallery, wysiwyg word processor, and newsletter add-on - and many more. Brilliantly coded, the theory behind is is to empower users to create websites without extensive programming on their own. There are dozens of free themes that you can use as a basis for giving your site the look and feel you desire.
Oh yes, and did I mention it is free?
The only price is a steep learning curve. When I first started learning Drupal it sometimes felt like I was climbing Mt. Everest without a Sherpa, barefoot, without oxygen. Documentation tends to lag behind development and often expects users to be building on knowledge from earlier versions of the software. There is no one single guide; instead, there is a mountain of information on-line in the form of wiki articles, docs, comments, and forums.
Using Drupal is the best place to start to get your feet wet with Drupal. Written primarily for beginning and intermediate Drupal users, it walks you through the steps in creating a full fledged website in a manner true to the fundamental aspirations of the software: you don't have to be a programmer to create an incredible site under Drupal.
Essentially a users manual for Administrators, the author's take you through the step-by-step details of setting up Drupal. They show you which modules you need to add, and how to use them.
This isn't the first book to attempt this, but it is clearly the best written. The editors have pared out the technobable, stripping the language to concise nuggets. This isn't a novel, its an operator's guide. And it is simply fantastic.
The authors explain what you need, why you need it, what it is going to look like, and how to set it up. They don't get bogged down in theory or complexity. Remember that time, long ago perhaps, when a friend explained the basics of how a computer works, and it all clicked. Using Drupal is like that: the patient, calm voice that comes through impresses with its Zen-like simplicity. Particularly if you've tried to learn Drupal without it, you'll have many "Aha! So that's how you do it!" moments as you make your way through Using Drupal.
Even though I've written a number of sites in Drupal, I picked up more than a handful of ideas, tips, and inspirations’ from this book. This is definitely the place to start learning Drupal. Spend a good weekend with this book and you'll be well on your way to building an incredibly powerful website.
While not a book intended to teach heavy duty theming or module development, when you're ready to take on those tasks I assure you, you'll wish there was a book as well written and edited as Using Drupal.
