Drupal for Education and E-Learning is now available from Packt Publishing. This book covers Drupal 6, and describes how to build a community site to support teaching and learning. This book is designed for people new to Drupal, with no prior development experience. The hands-on, step-by-step instructions guide you through installing Drupal, configuring contributed modules and themes, and working with some of Drupal’s most useful and powerful modules, including CCK, Views, and Organic Groups. The book also covers site maintenance, upgrades, and backups – these essential steps, while not as fun as site building, are essential for keeping your site and data secure.

This book is written with the needs of educational users in mind, but the information in this book can be useful for site administrators, or for people looking to build a community/social networking site in Drupal outside of education as well.

For people new to Drupal, the book includes details on:

• Drupal terminology;
• User creation;
• Role based access control;
• Installing modules and themes;
• Using taxonomy to categorize posts
• Backing up and upgrading your site.

For more experienced Drupallers, the book covers:

• Using CCK to extend content types -- instructions cover sharing media, images, links, text, and files;
• An overview of Views 2, including adding new views, using the new access control mechanisms of Views 2, configuring multiple displays from a single view, and cloning and modifying existing views;
• An overview of Organic Groups, including instructions on how to use groups to support informal and formal learning;
• Extending user profiles to support connections between users;

Using the menu and block system to simplify and streamline the navigation of your site.

For more specifics on information covered in this book, read through the Table of Contents.

Thanks and Acknowledgments

This book could not have been written without the support and help of fellow primates Marc Poris and Jeff Graham -- their feedback on the in-progress text helped immeasurably. The technical editiing and feedback of Peter Wolanin, Joel Farris, and Michael Peacock also helped drive the final revisions, and their work and input helped hone the final version of the text.

Additionally, the team of people at Packt worked tirelessly to help me bring this book out. In particular, David Barnes, Lata Basantani, and Swapna Verlekar put in countless hours helping this text evolve. Packt Publishing also contributes a portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book to the Drupal Association.

About the author

Bill Fitzgerald worked in education for 16 years before starting FunnyMonkey with Marc Poris in 2004. Bill has been active in the Drupal community since early 2005. As part of FunnyMonkey, Bill has helped develop sites for a variety of different learning organizations ranging from Elementary schools to K12 schools to University-level programs to Adult and Continuing Education programs. Bill also started the Drupal in Education group on groups.drupal.org.

Drupal version: Drupal 6.x