Drupal 6 Social Networking Review

When I first saw that this book was coming out, I was not really sure what to think.  First of all because most Drupal sites are at least to some degree about Social Networking.  And also because I thought it was a little hard to "split out" the social networking aspects of Drupal from the other aspects. 

What I think this book really is is a general introduction to Drupal, concentrating more on the social networking aspects than others. It also contains some general introduction to the concepts of social networking, and why it might be useful to the reader.

Okay, now I have to admit that I have a beef here - almost every Drupal book, no matter what aspect of Drupal it covers, seems to have a need to try to explain how to install Drupal.  This one is no different. Why waste pages on something that is already more than adequately covered in almost every other book, as well as the excellent instructions on the Drupal web site?  I've read perhaps a dozen Drupal books this year, and every one of them seems to have 20 pages of information that is almost identical to those in every other book.  Though I have to admit that at least this one is a little bit different in that it gives a small amount of insight into why one might want to make some configuration setups for a site specializing in social aspects - but still - give me a break. Editors at the various companies must feel that there's a need for this at the beginning of every book - but I'm getting tired of it taking up valuable space in every book that could be used for something more worthwhile.

Okay - so much for Chapter 1. Chapter 2 concentrates a little more on configuration of Drupal, and concentrates on a mythical site that is for owners of pet dinsaurs. It's original,, at least.  And although, again, this is ground covered in most Drupal books, at least here the information is written in a way likely to be understandable by people without a strong technical background, so I give it points for this. 

Chapter 3 delves more thoroughly into the actual use of Drupal, and how you might organize the content types, aggregate in external content (using both the core aggregator module and FeedAPI, which is nice because not very many books touch on the power of this module).  The chapter also speaks to the issues of roles in Drupal.  It touches very lightly on all of these issues, but at least gives an introductory background for a new Drupal user.

Chapter 4 speaks about Users and Profiles.  and integrating this in with some of the other features of Drupal such as track, and using OpenID and blogger themes. 

Chapter 5 finally gets to some of the issues that are more specific to Social Networking. In particular it speaks about Using Organic Groups, Contact, and User Relationships and Activities modules.  It's unfortunate that the "buddylist" sorts of modules have been in such flux lately in Drupal, making it hard to select a particular "best of breed" set of modules for these sorts of functions.  It would have been nice to see some coverage of other options, and a discussion of why the author chose these - not that this is a bad choice, but one of the maddening issues with Drupal these days is picking from the embarrassment of riches in module-land. I'm not sure that this helps.   And I have some serious questions about whether a 5 page chapter on Organic Groups is a lot of help, when I'm sure it's the case that an entire book this size on OG couldn't cover everything.  But this is in keeping with the general tone of the book, which is to introduce a topic, walk you through how you'd do basic setup of that feature, and then letting you figure out how to proceed from there.  This isn't necessarily a bad plan, since it's next to impossible to explain everything about any Druipal topic.  Still, I expect that one of the things that will happen with this book is that it will appeal to a lot of Drupal newbies because it's clearly written and chock full of examples.  But it may leave them wishing for a little more detail once the function is set up. 

Chapter 6 covers communications with users, and mailing lists.   This is one of the few Drupal books that talks about this in any detail. It gives examples on setting up mailings, ranging from the straightforward but limited Simplenews through many of the different software packages that can be used to send out newsletters by integrating with other modules and services. This includes PHPlist, Constant Contact, and others.  Again, this is a very complex topic for which people really could use a little more guidance than this book provides.  Still, it's a good start. 

Chapter 7 goes into modules.  This is a little odd since it introduces the notion of Drupal modules reather quickly, and then immediately leaps into writing some custom Drupal modules.  I'm sure the hackers out there are saying, "Yeah, so???" - but I think it's a little jarring, since up to this point almost everything about the book assumes the reader is fairly new to the web world, and suddenly with no warning there's a bunch of PHP code.  LIke many of the Drupal books floating around, I'm not real sure this one knows who its audience really is.  A newbie?  A PHP developer?  I'm not sure either is well served by this chapter since it pretty much just drops the code in your lap without any of the actual knowledge required to understand them.  But that's just me.  I think that particularly in this case, since the actual examples given really could have been done by using CCK and Views, it might have been better to include an intr4oduciton to CCK and Views rather than heading off into custom module land.  

Chapter 8 covers theming and design issues. I again wonder about the audience for the book since this chapter covers a lot of ground in a cursory manner, and quickly moves from installing stock modules to writing your own customizations.  Most people who need the first half of the chapter won't understand the second half. 

Chapter 9 talks about deployment.  This is actually likely to be fairly useful to a lot of new Drupal users, since it talks a little about security, how to get your site hosted, and backing up (though it's mostly useful in that regard to hosts using cPanel.)  

Chapter 10 covers promotion of your site, includeing a very brief introduciton to web advertising, newsletters, and how to create a social marketing whirl around your site. It also covers (and is one of the few books I know of that does) some of the notions of SEO in your site, and how you might use external tools like Google Sitemaps and Google Webmaster to keep track of how your site is doing out in the world.   

The book ends with a small Appendix on installing a WAMP server on your desktop computer, and configuring it to run Drupal.  This might well be helpful to people who are starting to learn about how to do web development.

Conclusion:

As with most books, I have mixed feelings.  This book covers many different topics that someone starting out with Drupal should understand.  This is great, because it gives a quick overview of a lot of Drupal topics, and how they might be leveraged to create a Social Networking web site. On the other hand, it just barely scratches the surface on so many of these topics that I'm not sure that someone could actually deploy a site based solely on the knowledge in this book.  It's a great book  to read and work through the examples.  Unfortunately I also think the reader will then need to have an understanding friend, or access to a lot more on-line resources for the Drupalista - most of which are never really pointed out in the book.

Still - as a quick introduction to building a Social Networking site based on Drupal, this is the book to have.

This book is available as a printed book from any book retailer.  You may purchase it from Amazon by clicking on the image.  The book is also available from Packt Publishing in printed form OR as a downloadable Ebook.  Thanks to Packt for providing me an ebook copy for this review.

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