Library Technology Reports Issue on Drupal in Libraries
Drupal in Libraries (Library Technology Reports 44:4, May/June 2008) by Andy Austin and Christopher Harris is a valuable overview of Drupal for a library audience. The 37-page issue is approachable and organized well, and provides enough detail to interest potential Drupal implementers while not overloading them with jargon or highly technical explanations of Content Management Systems or Drupal's architecture.
Chapters 1-4 are very good, particularly 3 ("Adding 'Stuff' to Drupal") and 4 ("User Management"), as these aspects of Drupal are often confusing to newcomers. One slight inaccuracy is the statement that Drupal is released under GNU Public License 3 (page 8) -- it is in fact licensed under version 2 or later. Numerous, well chosen screen snapshots illustrate the clear written explanations.
Chapter 5, "Customizing the Drupal Look", is not as focused or as useful as the ones that precede it. Is does cover the task of selecting, downloading, and activating themes, but only after an introductory section that describes the main features of the Drupal.org website. This section may be better situated in the "Who is Drupal" section in the first chapter. A noticable, and important, omission from Chapter 5 is that is does not discuss overriding themes using templates or theming functions, or even the core Color module, which lets site administrators change the entire color scheme of some themes using a web-based tool. Granted, template overrides do require creation of template files or the writing of site-specific modules, and detailed coverage of those topics would be out of place in this publication, but the new theming capabilities of Drupal 6 (which is the version portrayed in the screen snapshots) are extremely flexible and are intended to make overriding easier. Austin and Harris do hint at this ability by saying that it is possible to "tweak" the layout of the theme if you know some HTML and a little PHP, but it should be identified explicitly if not described in some detail.
The next three chapters cover Drupal modules, which offer a standardized, extensible way to provide functionality not included in the core Drupal application. As the authors point out, Drupal's modularity is one of its chief advantages, and they provide a clear explanation of why it is important to "not hack core," or in other words not modify the Drupal application files, but rather build custom modules to extend or override default functionality. Chapter 7 covers the most popular and useful modules for building useful sites, the Content Creation Kit, Views, and Panels. These modules, respectively, allow site administrators to create custom, structured content creation and editing forms for their site's users, to create highly customized lists of content for display and navigation, and to lay out different types of content in various locations on a site's pages. Austin and Harris' explanation of how these three modules work together is very useful. Chapter 8, "Other Modules of Note," briefly describes an additional set of standard modules that many sites will find invaluable. However, this chapter could mention more library-specific modules; for example, it doesn't mention Austin's MARC module (which allows the importing of MARC records into a Drupal site), or any of the other modules that allow integration of library OPACS into a Drupal site.
The final chapter consists of two case studies, both of which are in the form of interviews with Drupal implementors. The first is with one of the authors, Andy Austin, on the Fish4Info School Library System of Genesse Valley library portal, while the second is with the developer of the E-Branch in a Box service provided by the Idaho Commission for Libraries). Both case studies provide insights into the the implementation of Drupal in their respective contexts. It would be useful to have a case study on an academic or special library, provided space would have allowed for a third.
The authors also provide a brief list of resources where readers can find more information on Drupal, including two library-specific ones, the groups.drupal.org/library community and the Drupal4Lib email list. For some reason Drupalib isn't mentioned!
Overall, this issue of LTR will be useful to people looking for a clear, approachable introduction to Drupal. The gaps mentioned above are hopefully the result of space limitations -- 37 pages is very little space in which to provide a detailed overview of such a rich CMS. More information about this issue of Library Technology Reports, including how to order a copy, is available at ALA's Techsource site.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- ShareAlike 2.5 License.
Comments
Thanks for the write up
Mark, thanks for the review. I am glad that you liked the LTR issue, for the most part. We were trying to write more of an executive summary that someone outside the tech department (administration) might find accessible enough to read and get an idea of what made Drupal so powerful. I really think we found a good audience. They tell us that it sold out at ALA.
The challenge for me as someone who likes to write Drupal modules for fun, was constantly trying to keep it from being a technical manual. So therefore Chapter 5 was a little sparse on all the ways to override the Drupal core theme functions. I really struggled with wanting to give a more technical description of the theming functionality. Good point with the color module though, we should have definitely mentioned that.
As far as library modules, I didn't want to overhype the MARC module (which is still somewhat limited in what it does - keep an eye out for a new version though) but we should have had a large section on the very popular biblio module. I just totally missed the boat on that module.
Regarding the case studies, the Fish4Info interview was actually Chris's section and an interview with him that was for ALA techsource. But we should have had an academic library in there. We just ran out of space (and time). We also tried to set something up with Anne Arbor, as they were really the first publicizing Drupal in libraries, but we ran out of time and space on that one too.
Finally, I am really sorry about omitting Drupalib from the resources. I do keep tabs on the site, find it a valuable resource and even did try to contact you for a quote or testimonial, you must not have gotten my message. But we should still have had the site in our resources. That was unfortunately the section that we completed and was perhaps a bit incomplete. The site has been a tremendous resource to libraries and I just hope the LTR can continue the promotion of Drupal in libraries that you have been doing here for a number of years.
Thanks for the clarifications
Hi Andy, there's no doubt in my mind that your LTR issue will prove to be very useful for libraries considering Drupal, and I'm not surprised to hear that you had some pretty significant space constraints. That's the way it goes some times.... and BTW thanks for the kind words about this site.
Mark
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