Reviews of books dealing with webdesign and Content Management Systems in particular.
Barrie North has been a prolific writer about Joomla over the last few years. This is a review of his latest book called “Joomla! a Users Guide” about how to run a Joomla 1.5 website.
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I don’t often talk about work with private clients, but I had one really interesting experience that taught me a lot.
Early in 2007, I was asked by Apress.com to be the Technical Reviewer for Dan Rahmel’s new Joomla book: “Beginning Joomla! From Novice to Professional.” As a blogger it was fascinating to get a small glimpse into the world of book publishing and the processes they have for making sure a book hits the shelves ready-to-roll, with all spelling, grammatical and tutorial bugs squashed.
I’m really pleased to notice that its now the best-reviewed Joomla book on Amazon.com.
Barrie North from Joomlashack.com sent me a copy of his “Joomla Admin Manual” a long time ago and I promised to review it. Yep … I’ve been slack. It was only when a client told me earlier this week that he’d been reading it and found it useful, that I realized I needed to get my butt in gear and read it myself.
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Sometimes an author really should put their biography on the front of a book.
Before Tom Canavan sent me his new book: “Dodging the Bullets – A Disaster Preparation Guide for Joomla! Web Sites“, I didn’t realise just how impressive his background was in this area. A quick scan of Tom’s personal history reveals in addition to working for many multi-million dollar companies, he’s worked for a Fortune 100 company helping to design and build out their disaster recovery solution and spent two years making sure the plan was as good as possible.
His book aims to teach Joomla users how to plan and recover from almost any conceivable disaster that can hit a website.
Drupal has suffered somewhat in recent months, in comparison to other CMSs such as Joomla.? Whereas Joomla, which many developers consider to be a technically inferior CMS, has steamrollered ahead, Drupal has kept on plodding along. If you don?t believe me, go to Google Trends and see how the number of people searching for Joomla has doubled every three months while Drupal has inched slowly upwards, barely doubling in the last two years. Part of Joomla?s comparative success has been its branding success. Whereas Drupal has a slightly intimidating blue head for a logo and a staunchly community-orientated focus, Joomla presents a more friendly image with a colourful logo and plenty of commercial options available.
Whether the Drupal community wants or needs to keep up with such a rapid expansion is one question, but books such as ?Drupal ? Creating Blogs, Forms, Portals and Community Websites? by David Mercer can certainly help encourage more users.
It is stronger than many other CMS books for two key reasons, First, it hasn?t been been translated in the somewhat uneven and typo-strewn manner of similar books. Second, it attempts to show people the wider picture of what is involved in building a website ? it delves into how to plan and think about your site rather than just the nuts and bolts of how to build it.
The first chapter introduces Drupal with a heavy emphasis on using Drupal.org to find out more. This is sensible as so much introductory material is available online. The second chapter on setting up a development environment is the chapter I had most problems with, because it doesn?t quite explain things simply enough for someone setting out to build their own website for the first time. If you now how to use shell command to set up a Drupal site on your own computer you?ll be fine but otherwise you?ll just be following instructions without gaining much understanding.
The book then hits its stride in Chapter 3 (administration), Chapter 4 (frontend functionality) and Chapter 5 (access control). For anyone wanting to learn how to run a Drupal site, this middle section is invaluable as are Chapters 6 and 7 deal with adding content to your site. This section alone makes the book worth the purchase price because of its numerous screenshots and clear explanations.
Chapter 8 is the theme chapter and is more involved with modifications to existing themes than explaining how to create them. Chapter 9 is an odd mixture of ?advanced features? that could do with more focus and explanation. At one point it mentions, ?use something like the following command line?? which is not very useful for beginners. Partly however this is a limitation of Drupal itself which does require quite a lot of code work to run particular task. Chapter 10 goes beyond the title of the book to focus not just on creating but on running your Drupal site, including throttling, cron jobs and SEO.
Overall, ?Drupal ? Creating Blogs, Forms, Portals and Community Websites? is recommended. I?ve given it to clients in recent weeks and will continue to do so. It explains the Drupal basics but also has enough meat to help people to move beyond to develop a more advanced site.
Remember the days when software came in a big box with one small disc, lots of loose paper and a big, thick manual? Nowadays software is often downloaded with just a mouse click, which means no paper warranty to mislay and no manual to flick through. This leaves an opening for companies that want to sell you that missing manual. Invision Power Board 2: A User Guide from Packt Publishing is just such a book.
Chapter 1 gives you and overview of IPB, its history and its benefits. Ideally I would be nice to seen a comparison of IPB to rival forums, especially as most of IPBs rivals are given away free, but that would have distracted from the book? “manual” status.
Chapter 2 explains your options for purchasing IPB (it’s a minimum of $70) and then installing it. The whole procedure is not difficult and the book covers it in less than 10 pages.
Chapter 3 takes you through what the user will see. You get a tour that includes posting, searching, messaging and also the Calendar and the User Control Panel. Its easy to see how a relatively long chapter like this (nearly 30 pages) could be a great help to someone setting up an IPB for the first time.
Chapter 4 does the same for the administration section and is equally comprehensive. It is in Chapters 5 and 6 that the book moves from introducing us to IPB to telling us how to run a live site. These sections cover more advanced forum control and by the end I felt that a beginner would have had few problems following the explanations.
Chapter 7 is different from the rest of the book because it contains general advice on how to run a successful forum. Chapter 8 is the only part of the book that approaches IPB from anything like a technical angle. It explains how to manage the site’s skins and includes a discussion of how IPB achieves certain effects using CSS, XHTML and Macros.
All-in-all, IPB2AUG does what it does remarkably well. The book is small but well-written with copious images. Someone working quickly could use this book to set up and understand a site within 4 or 5 hours. How often could you say that about the brick-like book that you used to get out of the box?
{amazon_product}1904811515{/amazon_product}"Mastering Mambo" is a new book for people running and building websites with the Mambo Content Management System., It was written in an awkward time, when the Mambo CMS was in the process of splitting from Joomla, but because the codebases of both projects is still so similar, "Mastering Mambo" is a relevant book for both Mambo and Joomla users.
Initially, I was a little confused about the target audience for this volume. The same publisher (Packt) also has a book called "Building Websites with Mambo" that would be more appropriate than for Mambo beginners. The authors, Tobias Hauser and Christian Wenz, describe this book as being for "dministrators, designers and developers" which encompasses a pretty wide group of people with diverse skill-levels.
The first part of the book begins by covering the most basic features such as how to logon, install components, change templates and so on. It would suit someone building a site for the first time with Mambo.
As it progresses, the book becomes more complex. There are chapters on Mambelfish, VirtueMart (called PHP-Shop here) and DocMan as well as chapters that summarise options for people wanting forums and galleries. By the time it gets to page 180 out of 250, the authors are describing how to develop your own modules and mambots. This is done in a clear way, with Mambo’s functions and variables explained quickly and concisely.
That completed, the third part of the book describes ways to complete a successful Mambo deployment. The Search Engine Optimisation chapter is OK, but could do with more information on producing a Google-friendly template rather than just human-readable URLs. The Accessibility chapter could also do with more Mambo-specific advice.
However, there are two excellent chapters in this final section. The chapter on security is very useful. It covers cross site scripting, SQL injection, unexpected user data and more. It offers smart advice and is reasonably detailed. Finally, the performance and caching chapter is short and sweet, particularly in its coverage of the uses that Zend software.
Overall, the book is well-written and has a lot of useful illustrations. Nonetheless, it suffers from two weaknesses. One is the unavoidable problem that software development moves more quickly than publishing process and some of the information here is inevitably out-of-date. The second is that although I liked "Mastering Mambo", I’m unsure who to recommend it for. Rather it is an all-round effort. Administrators can use the first part of the book. Developers new to Mambo will benefit from the second half.