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Drupal 7 Fields/CCK Beginner's Guide
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November 16, 2011
When building websites with a CMS sooner or later you're bound to experience the limitations: there is a limited number of page types you can use. Most CMSes have articles, forms, blog pages - but what if your site needs product pages, recipes, people pages, photo gallery pages or anything othert type of page? The Drupal 7 CMS excels in offering a flexible solution for this right out of the box: creating custom pages through the built-in Content Construction Kit and the use of fields. This allows you to create all sorts of customized ways to enter and display any type of content.
CCK and fields are quite important concepts in Drupal 7, but to beginners it's not at all clear how to use and deploy these advanced techniques of content presentation. Although it might not seem obvious to write a book solely on these seemingly advanced concepts for beginners, it is in fact a great idea - other beginner's guids to Drupal tend to sratch just the surface, leaving it to the reader to go on and experiment.
I found Dave Poons book delivers what it promises: it offers a practical approach and a great introduction to the practical use of CCK and Views. It’s great that the author shows how things work using real-life step-by-step examples (such as recipe pages, cooking tips pages) and explains the desired results up front, so that the reader gets a full understanding of what they'll be working towards (there are a lot of computer books where you have to follow instructions without being told what you're aiming at - which can be frustrating).
The only topic I missed in this book is using the Views extension in conjunction with CCK and Fields, but then again, Views is complex enough to justify a separate book. I can recommend the Fields/CCK Beginner’s Guide to anyone who wants to use Drupal to build flexible websites, having full control over page types and page layouts.
CCK and fields are quite important concepts in Drupal 7, but to beginners it's not at all clear how to use and deploy these advanced techniques of content presentation. Although it might not seem obvious to write a book solely on these seemingly advanced concepts for beginners, it is in fact a great idea - other beginner's guids to Drupal tend to sratch just the surface, leaving it to the reader to go on and experiment.
I found Dave Poons book delivers what it promises: it offers a practical approach and a great introduction to the practical use of CCK and Views. It’s great that the author shows how things work using real-life step-by-step examples (such as recipe pages, cooking tips pages) and explains the desired results up front, so that the reader gets a full understanding of what they'll be working towards (there are a lot of computer books where you have to follow instructions without being told what you're aiming at - which can be frustrating).
The only topic I missed in this book is using the Views extension in conjunction with CCK and Fields, but then again, Views is complex enough to justify a separate book. I can recommend the Fields/CCK Beginner’s Guide to anyone who wants to use Drupal to build flexible websites, having full control over page types and page layouts.
Displaying 1 of 1 review