Book Review: Drupal 6 Site Blueprint by Timi Ogunjobi

Drupal 6 Site Blueprint by Timi Ogunjobi is a hands on practical examples of building 12 different sites. This book is actually very useful if you are starting out with Drupal for the first time. As anyone can tell you with the abundant of modules available it takes a long time to familiarise yourself with which module to choose to get the job done, as well as the time it takes to test them out.

Drupal 6 Site Blueprint book manages to hand pick the best modules for certain type of sites therefore reducing your time spend on searching for the right modules. Of course, there are many ways to achieve the same type of site you want from Drupal but i think this book provides the best examples and modules used for a given site you want to develop.

As someone who is experienced in using Drupal, they can tell you some of the most frequently used modules and core features are CCK, Views, Image, Taxonomy, Menu and all these are covered extensively in this book. This is great as it also expands your knowledge with these modules so you soon expand beyond just building sites from the examples this book has provided.

Each example are very different so there's certainly something for everyone here. The example sites are:

  1. Personal Site
  2. School Site
  3. An Aficionado's site
  4. Event Site
  5. Community Site
  6. A Newspaper Site
  7. Ecommerce Site (Using Ubercart)
  8. A Directory Site
  9. Photo Sharing Site
  10. Conference Booking Site
  11. Google Map site
  12. News Aggregating Site

What's more, the diagrams and instructions are very easy to follow step by step.

I highly recommend this book for people that are new to Drupal. It'll certainly give you a head start in the site development. My only complain is that some of the example sites are not really complete site examples but rather a feature for a site. But this isn't a too much of a problem as you can combine them for your own site. This is made possible due to the modularity of Drupal. For example, your building a community site which also allow users to add/view events then you can actually follow the example site in creating the event feature for you community site. Basically, you can combine any examples and mix them into one site.

You can purchase 'Drupal 6 Site Blueprint at Packt Publishing

Thanks to Packt Publishing for this complimentary book.

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