Review of Drupal 7 Business Solutions

Drupal 7 Business SolutionsYou can think of Drupal 7 Business Solutions as a magnificent and never ending blog post showing how a business owner can truly get an extremely functional website going using the CMS framework Drupal. The book, written by Trevor James and Mark Noble and published by Packt Publishing, is of course so much more: it includes all the details, all the steps actually required, to design, build, launch and maintain such a website (in this case, the Artisan Bakers Collective Website is the case study used throughout).

Drupal 7 Business SolutionsYou can think of Drupal 7 Business Solutions as a magnificent and never ending blog post showing how a business owner can truly get an extremely functional website going using the CMS framework Drupal. The book, written by Trevor James and Mark Noble and published by Packt Publishing, is of course so much more: it includes all the details, all the steps actually required, to design, build, launch and maintain such a website (in this case, the Artisan Bakers Collective Website is the case study used throughout).

I say analogous to a blog post because it dialogs with you in such an easy style, even though it tells you absolutely everything you as the novice site builder needs to know in order to get the job done. 

It is a perfect book for people who would like to actually use Drupal for that first project. It even goes over whether or not to use Drupal at all. And then introduces the reader to the back-end interface, to how content is managed, and in general how to set up the website, with menus, look and feel and enhanced functionality thanks to the better known and trusted contributed modules.

All the basic elements of the Drupal constructor set are covered (content types, taxonomies, membership and roles) and then specific business use cases are covered, such as how to set up a rating system, user surveys and polls, a complete corporate blog system (including the aggregation of content from other sites), newsletters and calendars, sharing content with social networks, the publishing of documents, and image galleries and slideshows. 

It is a very recomendable book, and one that does not leave you in the lurch, since it tackles subjects usually left out of non-“Pro” books (and even some that are), such as maintaining and administering your site (including automated database backups), caching and optimization, the creation of content workflows, as well as the upgrade of Drupal core and contributed modules.