Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions

Description

Everybody knows that a business needs a website for its growth and customer interface. However, building a website can be a difficult as well as time consuming process if you do it yourself. Simple website builders do not give you access to modern functionality and can be difficult to maintain. Paying a website designer to build a complete custom website can be very expensive and you need to pay every time you want a simple change.

Drupal is a powerful, free system that anyone can use in order to create their own website. With such a powerful tool at your fingertips there is no longer any need to pay professionals to design a site when you can do the same job yourself absolutely free.

This book is your step-by-step guide to building your business website in Drupal, complete with a blog, events calendar, catalogue of products and services, and more.

In this book, we will build a complete website for a fictional client from scratch. We start at the beginning by downloading and installing Drupal, progress to creating and editing pages, and then we explore the most popular modules for Drupal. All functionality is presented in a clear step-by-step format which is easy to follow as you build your own site.

This book will explore several modules that will allow you to do everything from adding calendars and events to integrating content from Flickr and YouTube. Each chapter adds some features to your website and brings you closer to your customers.

At the end of the book, you should be able to build a site on your own or have the confidence and knowledge to hire a professional to develop a site for you which meets your business needs. You will get connected to your customers and find ways to make more money.

CONTENTS:

Chapter 1 - Introduces Drupal as well as the Good Eatin' website, our fictional client for this book. We will download and install Drupal onto our webserver and perform a basic setup of the site.

Chapter 2 - In this chapter, we will begin building the content of our website and setup the navigation system. Next, we will add images and slideshows to the site. Finally, we will install a custom theme for our site to change its overall appearance.

Chapter 3 - In this chapter, we use CCK and views to create the restaurants menu showing the items available at each meal. We will also use Taxonomies to categorize the content in the menu.

Chapter 4 - In this chapter we will invite our customers to interact with the site using comments, rating content, filling out polls, and answering surveys.

Chapter 5 - In this chapter, we build a company blog so customers can easily get timely updates from our company and we integrate content from blogs on other websites.

Chapter 6 - In this chapter, we create a calendar to display current events at the Good Eatin' website. We will also build a newsletter so we can deliver information straight to our customer's inboxes on a regular basis.

Chapter 7 - In this chapter, we integrate content from several popular services including Flickr, YouTube, and Google Maps to enhance our site. We will also discuss publishing our website to social networking sites like Digg and del.ico.us.

Chapter 8 - In this chapter, we add downloadable content to our site including PDF files and other freebies. We will also discuss ways of automatically generating printable content and PDF files from our pages so customers can save any content they want for future usage.

Chapter 9 - In this chapter, we setup a takeout menu for our restaurant and allow customers to place orders online and pay for them at our eCommerce site.

Chapter 10 - In this chapter, we discuss maintaining your site including backing up files, optimizing your site, and updating the site when new versions of Drupal and custom modules are released.

Chapter 11 - In this chapter, we explore ways of adapting the techniques we have learned in this book to a variety of other types of businesses. We also discuss outsourcing your website development to a professional and leveraging the knowledge you gained in this book to ensure you get the site you want for the best possible price.