Drupal BOOKS for a NOOBIE (Your Top 3)
Hello!
I've decided to make the dive into Drupal and want to buy some books. Any advice? If you could only buy 3 books to help you learn Drupal, what 3 books would you buy? THANKS.
I'm coming to Drupal as a graphic designer who has been using WordPress CMS. I'm pretty good with CSS, HTML and learning PHP. My goal is to be about to develop Drupal E-Commerce sites and create custom Themes.
Here's my list of potential books so far:
1. Using Drupal by Angela Byron (December 16, 2008), ISBN-10: 0596515804
2. Drupal 6 Themes by Ric Shreves (October 13, 2008), ISBN-10: 1847195660
3. Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6, Packt Publishing David Mercer (April 4, 2008), ISBN-10: 1847192971
p.s. While I'm at it, I'd like to ask the question to know if I'm correct in thinking that Drupal is a solid choice for advanced e-commerce site development (vs. Joomla, for example). Thanks!
I had a great book for 5.x,
I had a great book for 5.x, I think they have re-published it for 6.x - it was called 'Pro Drupal Development' by Matt Westgate and John Vandyke
http://www.drupalbook.com/
I highly recommend that one.
Great choices
I think based on your skills and goals, the three you've chosen are perfect. Pro Drupal Development is really more for the PHP/module development side of things.
And yes, I'd definitely put Drupal above Joomla for e-commerce -- you can go so much further with integration amongst other Drupal modules. Are you thinking of Ubercart or the eCommerce module? I'm personally a fan of the former :)
___________________________________________________________________________
{ Drupal Themes by TopNotchThemes }
Gorgeous, 100% original themes for Drupal 5 & 6, plus Ubercart themes
reply to stephthegeek
Thanks for your reply. At this point, I've just been reading a lot about Drupal and had determined that eCommerce (module) for Drupal sounded like my best option.
Then, during my research, I came across Magento. I must say, Magento looks awesome. So, I started searching for info. about Drupal+Magento integration. So far, I'm not sure that it exists. But I'm pretty convinced that Magento is what I want for e-commerce.
Now, to be honest, I'm beginning to wonder if Drupal is for me. My only reason for looking at Drupal was for more advanced e-commerce. But if Magento meets that need, I may be able to stick with WordPress+Magento.
I suppose the Magento+WordPress vs. Magento+Drupal is an entirely different debate. But please let me know if you have any insights.
Thank you.
CMS + E-Commerce
Disclaimer: I am an Ubercart developer.
When I was considering starting the Ubercart project I went through a long process of comparing different e-commerce packages and integration efforts. Like you, I wanted both a good CMS and good e-commerce features. My research indicated that there were very few (none in my opinion) effective attempts at integrating a separate CMS and E-commerce package. I looked at many oscommerce + "X" ZenCart +"Y" etc. etc. etc. I even went so far as to test a few in small production environments and took a stab or two at doing it myself. The end result was always the same. What I wanted was CMS features for my E-commerce products and vice versa. What I got was two separate sets of content with two different sets of features, two separate administration areas sharing the same users, and a plethora of headaches. After getting my hands dirty with the code I realized that most CMS's and E-commerce packages are significantly different in the way they handle internal data structures. Really, the best an integration can do is create some glue code which will make the two systems share menus, users, paths and a few other things, but they are never going to really be integrated because all the features you really want to be combined can't be without rewriting huge portions of one or both package. To make matters worse, the developer of the integration is then trying to keep the glue code in sync with two moving targets (new code and releases for both the CMS and E-commerce packages).
These are the reasons I decided E-Commerce as a tightly integrated module of a CMS is the best option. In my opinion Ubercart + Drupal, E-Commerce + Drupal, and Virtumart + Joomla are the best options.
I do not know about Magento+WordPress, but I have been keeping up with Magento's efforts to integrate with Drupal. As best I can tell, The Magento Marketing types have said it is in the works. The Magento developer types have said they looked at it but are not actively working on it. In my opinion, this means the marketing crew thinks it would be great, but the development crew has no intention of going down that road. As far as I know, there is no actual code, and I doubt there ever will be.
Peace,
-Andy
P.S. Please reconsider Ubercart. We may not be a big company with lot's of time to spend on marketing, our website etc. . . But Ubercart has many powerful features, good solid code, and tight integration with a kick ass CMS. I think you will find that Ubercart is better then Magento in many E-commerce specific respects including sales of digital good, product attributes, translation, and flexibility when it comes to shipping and taxes. This doesn't even begin to account for all the cool CMS features Drupal brings to the table. One important feature Ubercart is lacking in comparison to Magento is Magento's ability to manage multiple sites from one administration site.