Preface

To make this book a little easier to read, I use a story of a Drupal user who has advanced to the point of being able to do their own site building. Setting the stage for the story woven into the book, let's start with a bit of background for the story.

Blue Drop Realty started business in 2002 as a part-time "hobby" of the owner, Lynn. As their business grew, they decided to build a website in 2005 using Dreamweaver to lay out their pages. This worked okay for about 5 years, but it was taking too much of Lynn's time to update the pages, and the site's design was starting to look dated. The business had grown enough that they had a new website developed by Fancy Websites, Inc., who used Drupal 6 to build the new website. With Drupal, the office manager and even some of the salespeople were able to make changes to the pages.

Lynn is joined in this story by her grey tabby cat, Jackson, an alley cat, literally, who adopted Lynn's family a couple of years ago. Once Jackson got comfortable with the new surroundings and being around a family, he frequently would curl up on Lynn's desk next to her monitor when she would work at night. Lynn has gotten into the habit of talking to Jackson as she works—he has proven to be a good listener.

Their Drupal 6 website is still working fine for Blue Drop Realty, but knowing that when Drupal 8 is released, support for Drupal 6 will end shortly afterward, Lynn is considering options to upgrade to the latest version of Drupal. She has gotten comfortable with Drupal 6 and even makes some "programming" changes to the site using the Drupal user interface as a site administrator. Lynn was able to add a news release content type herself, but she had to have Fancy Websites, Inc. create the views to display a list of releases on a news page. As she worked with Drupal, Lynn learned how to modify some views and even build a relatively simple list view on her own.

Jim is the developer at Fancy Websites, Inc., which built Lynn's original Drupal 6 site. As Lynn learns and becomes more comfortable with Drupal, Jim will morph from the developer who built the site to Lynn's mentor, as she herself will grow from a new content editor to site builder. More than anything else, Jim will help Lynn whenever she gets stuck.