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Lynn Beighley’s Drupal for Dummies, a Book Review

A Review of Lynn Beighley’s Drupal for Dummies

Let’s look at Lynn Beighley’s Drupal for Dummies. This is a beginners’ reference for learning the basics of Drupal. Frankly, after getting through the installation, it all seemed rather simple.  I suppose this is a testament to Ms. Beighley’s skills as a writer and an educator. I don’t mind reviewing a book with the word “Dummies” in the title.

Details

The book is written in the standard Dummies modular format, whereby you can skip around if you wish and not lose too much by not taking everything in order. A good thing, as the chapter on setting a strategy inexplicably comes after the one on installation.

To my mind, that is placing the cart before the horse. Don’t we want a strategy before we go to the trouble of purchasing a domain and starting to put content out there? After all, a poorly conceived site could financially harm a company.

The book is also a little confusing when it comes to differentiating pages and stories. Stories seem to be aggregations of pages, or they might be more frequently updated than pages, but that’s tough to tell at first read.

The book discusses forums a bit but does not go far into community management as a whole. There doesn’t seem to be anything in here about, for example, restricting user access or even out and out denying a user access to any given site. While banning users is not the only function of a Community Manager, it’s still an important one. And it can be one that a CM needs to do rather quickly.

It’s outside of scope to talk about community management theory, strategy or values. But a quick how-to when it comes to banning users would be a fine (and small!) addition to this book. However, using a Captcha to eliminate auto-joining bots, and Mollom to detect spam, are covered.

Helpful Stuff

The main features of Drupal come out when Ms. Beighley talks about themes and basic site modules, such as blogs, image galleries and storefronts. The reader begins to see why Drupal might be a good choice for creating a website. There’s little to no coverage of the Open Source culture that created Drupal, but that’s probably beside the point.

The main purpose of the book is to get an Administrator going with setting up and using Drupal. But there’s very little on modification, shy of basic changes such as swapping out themes. One never gets into the guts of the application and Beighley never lifts the hood.

There are links pointing to websites where a user can learn more about the application. But they seem to be an addition to the end of the book. Even a pointer to a more advanced Dummies book on Drupal (even if there’s an attempt to bundle two books in order to increase the profit to the enormous Dummies empire) would be of some help.

It just feels like, when you get to the end of the book: now what?

Rating for Drupal for Dummies

2/5

An Update, 13 Years Later

Over a decade later, it feels as if it was a waste of time to read this book, and a waste of money to buy it. After all, per W3Techs and Creative Minds, Drupal has never even cracked 3% of the share of website CMS systems in use.

Like many things, it still has its champions and its diehard users. But WordPress sits at just under half of all CMS systems in use. Since 2011, WordPress has steadily increased in popularity, never holding less than 13% of the share.

Drupal, on the other hand, has been declining since its 2.3% heyday of 2018. And in 2022, it wasn’t just WordPress that was eating Drupal’s lunch. So were Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, and Joomla—and Shopify didn’t even get off the ground until 2014.

One thing I have noticed about particularly difficult types of software with diehard aficionado users is—eventually it all kind of turns into a secret clubhouse. Knock the right way and—maybe—you’ll be permitted entry into the mysteries of Drupal.

But sorry, aficionados, but I am not going to turn myself in knots to try to master something that cannot hold its own against, well, Wix.

And as for learning it, either with Drupal for Dummies or any other book?

Ain’t nobody got time for that.

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