Book Review: Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting by Konstantin Käfer, Emma Hogbin - Page 2

With that out of the way, let's take a look at how Front End Drupal presents information to this audience.

Chapter 1 - Web Page Design
Chapter 1 is an interesting look at crafting the functionality of a site, from both a marketing and usability perspective. It's an impromptu brainstorming session on thinking through how the site will work -- as well as what should or shouldn't be there -- on through to the intended users and administrators of a site, before you even finish design or begin building things out. It's a valid exercise that more people should go through, even if it doesn't necessarily have a strong connection with the rest of the book.

Chapter 2 - The Themer's Toolkit
This is a sort of preface to the theming section, and provides the theory behind how Drupal themes are constructed, as well as an introduction to the terminology that you will need to get accustomed to when dealing with Drupal. It also goes over some standard development modules with which to familiarise yourself, as well as general development tools that can aid your development process. This chapter has some good information, but doesn't quite do enough to thoroughly explain the main Drupal terms and concepts (primarily the fundamental "node", "block" and "page"). It leans more on the summary and reference side.

Chapter 3 - Working With Drupal Themes
Chapters 3 - 5 are the actual theming and page content/display chapters. Chapter 3 starts things off with an overview of the different component files that make up a Drupal theme, and how they interact with the system. It also briefly discusses points to be aware of when converting themes from other platforms (WordPress and Joomla! are dealt with specifically). Unfortunately, this is the most disappointing chapter in the book, as it misses a huge opportunity to clarify and demonstrate something that is in short supply both on Drupal's site and other sites devoted to Drupal: straighforward, real-world examples of theming. Many places suggest starting off with stripped-down "starter" themes, such as Zen and to learn from example. That is done here as well, and is one example of the laziness of the chapter. The book in general continually references you elsewhere for details or examples, instead of demonstrating and explaining with original content.

Chapter 4 - The Drupal Page
With the poor setup of Chapter 3, this next chapter -- as well as the one following -- might be poorly judged, since some of the fundamental ideas dealt with as assumed knowledge weren't clearly handled to begin with. It makes the actual fleshing out of site content a more esoteric process than with other platforms. Again, a real world example such as an actual PSD-to-Drupal conversion would have explained the process much more readily. Instead, component pieces are dealt with in isolation (menus, content blocks, etc.) instead of as pieces of a cohesive whole.

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