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The Myths of Innovation

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new developments in technology, science, and business

This is a book which seeks to de-bunk the myths of invention. Most of us are brought up to believe that Isaac Newton discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head, and that Archimedes had a ‘Eureka!’ moment in his bath. Scott Berkun points out that neither of these two myths is true, and that almost all technical innovations come about as a result of years and years of research, failed attempts, and lots of hard work. He also points out that history is not only written by the victors, but that it commonly misses out the failures, wastes, and losses that go to make up a success. His telling example here is Rome, whose architectural glories are actually built on the ruins of a city that was previously burned to the ground.

The Myths of InnovationOnce these myths are out of the way, he looks at how innovations do come about, and wonders if there is any way of planning for them or creating systems that will encourage them. No matter how much we might wish there were, his answer is ‘It can’t be done’ in both cases.

In fact the more he looks at real-life examples, the more it becomes apparent that perfectly good innovations can fail for lack of appreciation, audience, funding, and a host of other reasons. When he looks closely at the provenance of success stories it’s obvious that they must

  • not be too far ahead of their time
  • fit within existing sets of beliefs
  • be simple to adopt
  • meet an existing need

As he puts it in one of his many amusing examples, if free mobile phones had mysteriously appeared in 9th century England, they would have been burned as witches’ eggs.

The World Wide Web, the medium through which we all live and breathe, was invented by Tim Berners-Lee because he couldn’t remember where his colleagues’ research papers were located. So he devised a simple coding system (HTML) which allowed documents to be tagged. A Eureka moment? No – because look what was already in place, on which this system ran.

First there had been the invention of the computer roughly fifty years before – at Manchester University, where Alan Turing and Ludwig Wittgenstein were both members of staff. There had already been established a world-wide network of computer connections (ARPANET). Packet-switching (the unsung gem of communication technology) had recently been invented. And the personal computer with its attendant gizmos of mouse, screen, and keyboard had been developed. You get the point: the Web and HTML was an amazing development which has changed all our lives – (and I still don’t know why Berners-Lee hasn’t been given a Nobel Prize, if Winston Churchill can have one for literature). But the Web was built on lots of other inventions, and it came at the right time.

The book dips slightly in the middle when he looks at the (largely negative) effect managers have on innovations and efficiency, but true to the theories he is propounding, he pulls some positive lessons out of the exploration.

Then towards the end of the book he looks at the social and political results of major innovations. Unsurprisingly, these turn out to be wholly ambiguous. Motor cars liberate people to travel wherever they wish, but they also pollute the atmosphere and kill people in their hundreds of thousands every year. DDT helped to control typhus and malaria, but it got into the lower species’ food chain and caused havoc. Einstein’s theories revolutionised cosmology, but also led to the development of the atomic bomb.

This summary makes it all sound rather negative. But his overall message is not so. He merely wants us to realise that the world is a messier place than we often realise; that we shouldn’t accept the over-simplified stories we are fed – even about successful inventions; and that what we regard as somebody’s ‘breakthrough moment’ might to them be the end of a lifetime’s slog.

It’s also a very readable book – the first I have ever come across in which the technical colophon was the funniest part.

© Roy Johnson 2007

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Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2007, pp.178, ISBN: 0596527055

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The Non-Designer’s Web Book

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best-selling Web design manual for beginners

Robin Williams is a top Web design guru, and this is one of her best-selling books. You can see why. The Non-Designer’s Web Book is clearly presented, beautifully designed, and lavishly illustrated with full colour screen shots and examples of successful Web pages. It’s a book for beginners. Everything is chunked into single or double-page spreads; all the main points of her advice are clearly illustrated; and she covers every stage of establishing a Web presence – from understanding how the Web works to designing, uploading, and promoting your own site. Users at an introductory level will like her approach, because she assumes you will want to use a web editor such as FrontPage, Netscape Composer, or Adobe PageMill.

The Non-Designer's Web BookThere are no details of coding – unless you must – and each chapter ends with a self-assessment quiz. You can check what you have understood, before moving on to the next step. She explains the advantages of Web over print publication – full colour at no cost; interactivity with customers; and instant updates.

She’s also very good on the need for page design basics – alignment, repetition, contrast, and proximity. That is, page elements should be arranged on a grid; topics should be tightly grouped, not scattered; and colour coding plus repetition should be used to create visual unity and coherence.

She shows why designing Web pages is different from designing printed pages, and why a site can look terrific on one monitor but terrible on another. There’s a lot on creating and controlling graphics, and plenty of examples of good and bad design. A couple of chapters describe how to avoid obvious mistakes that would otherwise make your work look amateurish.

The book also includes details of how to get a site up and running, register your domain name, and add it to search engines. After the design is finished and implemented, the site has to be uploaded and updated – and this is explained, too.

If you’re going to build Web sites, for either personal or professional use, but you don’t know where to begin, start with this book. It’s easy to read, avoids confusing jargon, and it’s full of do’s and don’ts to help you avoid common snags.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Robin Williams and John Tollett, The Non-Designer’s Web Book, Berkeley (CA): Peachpit, 2nd edn, 2000, pp.304, ISBN: 0201710382

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the Online Learning idea book

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95 ways to enhance technology-based learning

I’ve been teaching online learning courses almost as long as they have existed, and I know that both course designers and students need as much support as they can get. This book is aimed at the tutors and course designers and has the sole aim of helping them make the experience of learning on line more interactive, more enjoyable, and more effective. There are two in-built problems with online courses. Schools, colleges, and universities (to say nothing of commercial enterprises) want to eliminate expensive tutor-contact time, and make courses available any hour of the day. But anything beyond elementary lessons requires students to produce work which is assessed by a live tutor – who needs to be paid for reading on screen or on paper. That’s the first problem: it’s not easy to teach complex issues and subjects on a computer screen.

the Online Learning idea bookThe second is that making online courses truly interactive is an expensive business. Confronting students with rich learning experiences usually ends up requiring Flash animations, specially shot video footage, or interactive games of one kind or another – all of which are costly to produce. Faced with these problems, many teachers end up doing nothing more than sticking their lecture notes online in the form of downloadable Word files.

This book is a collection of techniques and strategies which have been tried out by practising teachers – who are confident enough to give their names and the web addresses of their own materials. Suggestions start at a point even before formal learning begins, with ideas for ‘learning agreements and ‘study schedules’ which students sign up to and which hopefully keep them on track and up to date. Some struck me as mildly utopian, but I liked the ‘eLearning Portfolio’, which would undoubtedly be useful.

The next section deals with learning via social interaction – collaborative projects and team-working – then what follows naturally from that, learning via discussion. The guidance ‘rules’ for forum postings are sound – though in my experience it’s quite difficult to enforce these without seeming over-controlling.

For completely individual learners working in isolation, the suggestions include visual diaries, email biographies, shared bookmarks, ‘visiting’ expert speakers (using podcasts), the ‘mini quest’ (which I would call a ‘small project’) blogs, and peer editing.

Synchronous learning activities rely heavily on chat, instant messaging, and pre-arranged forums. The main thrust in the suggestions made here are to enable participants to feel comfortable interacting with each other.

When it comes to self-assessment exercises we are into puzzles and games, flash cards, drag-and-drop activities, and multiple choice questions. But be warned – these can be expensive, unless you use off-the-shelf templates.

The latter part of the book deals with the actual structure, design, and navigation systems of online courses. This offers templates to cut down on design time, tips for maximising usability, and ideas for creative design – including some very funny clips at www.zefrank.com.

One interesting feature in my reading of this book was that ideas for one learning strategy or technique would come to me whilst I was busy reading about suggestions for something completely different.

Two things are for certain: the range of suggestions is amazing, and you’re sure to find something amongst them which will appeal to you. The editor Patti Shank has wisely stuck to a very tight formula for presenting these ideas. None takes up more than three pages, including screenshots, and the authors are even asked to show how their ideas can be adapted for other uses. This is a boon for online course designers.

© Roy Johnson 2007

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Patti Shank (ed) the Online Learning idea book, San Francisco: John Wiley, 2007, pp.354, ISBN: 0787981680

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The Whole Internet

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updated version of first complete Internet guide

The Whole Internet was one of the earliest-ever computer books to become a best-seller. That was in 1992, when the first major wave of Net users needed information, and there as very little of it about. Ed Krol produced a manual which was well informed, comprehensive, and examined the technology in detail. However, it wasn’t very easy to read, and you needed to grapple with an arcane command-line interface which assumed you had grown up with Unix as a second language.

The Whole InternetThis new version is an update and complete re-write. It is based on the big changes which have come over the Net and the way it is used in the last eight years. Number one development of course is the Web, which moves up from a subsidiary chapter in the original to occupy the centre of this edition. Former features such as Gopher, Archie, and Veronica on the other hand are relegated to a footnote section called ‘Archaic Search Technologies’.

But this difference also makes the manual easier to read and understand. The emphasis has been changed from how the Net works, to how it can be used. There is far less impenetrable code cluttering the pages. Instead we get clean screen shots and nice photographs of what the Net looks like on screen, not at the DOS prompt. Ed Krol has been been very fortunate in choosing his co-author, and their co-operation has produced a far more readable book.

They cover all the basics which someone new to the Net would need to know. How to send email and follow the conventions of netiquette.; what to do with attachments; how to behave on mailing lists; understanding newsgroups; and how to deal with security, privacy, and Spam. They explain how to choose from a variety of Web browsers (including even one for the Palm Pilot). I was struck by how much more accessible all this technology has become in the short time since I struggled through the first edition.

This radical shift in user-centred design is also reflected by the inclusion of completely new chapters on Net commerce, banking, gaming, and personal finance. After a chapter on how to create your own Webages, there is an introduction to what are called ‘esoteric and emerging technologies’ – conferencing, streaming audio and video, and electronic books. This is a very successful attempt to cover the full range of the Net and its activities in a non-snobbish manner. They end with practical information – maximising the effectiveness of your Internet connection, searching techniques, and they offer a thick index of recommended resources.

The original Whole Internet may have been a more striking phenomenon because of its originality at the time, but this new edition has the potential to reach even more readers, largely because it explains the Net and shows how it can be used in a way which is much more attractive and accessible. It has gone straight onto my bibliography of essential Net reading, and I will certainly be recommending it to all my students.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Kiersten Connor-Sax and Ed Krol, The Whole Internet: The Next Generation, Sebastopol: O’Reilly, 1999, pp.542, ISBN 1565924282

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Towards Electronic Journals

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future directions for academic publishing

Academic publishing is in crisis. In the past, university researchers have been dependent on publishers to print and distribute their work in the form of books and scholarly journals. Now that they realise they can use the Internet, it’s time to change. Here are the arguments. Academics are under pressure to publish. If they produce articles, books, and research papers which are assessed by their peers, this helps them to promote their careers – and we may or may not be wiser for what they write. All this is done at the expense of taxpayers, who foot the bill for their salaries whilst they spend time writing. Academic publishers take their works and turn them into marketable products. And who buys these very specialised products? Well, very few people actually. Mainly research libraries – also funded by taxpayers’ money.

Towards Electronic JournalsThere’s an interesting conjunction here. Academic authors receive very little in the way of royalties from these sales. A five percent payment on sales is normal for a book. Zero percent is equally normal for a journal; and there have recently been tales of writers paying publishers to produce their work.

D’you think that’s bad? There’s worse to come. At the moment, because the UK academic ratings are taken at fixed intervals, some publishers have recently been making it known that a payment from authors would help, just to move their work up the production schedule, in time for the next assessment.

The authors have actually been paid already in terms of time off from a salaried post to produce the works [the system of termly and yearly ‘sabbaticals’ – that is, fully paid leave]. They will be rewarded by the salary increases (and more time off) which come with promotion. But at the very time when cuts in public expenditure mean that libraries are no longer able to subscribe to expensive journals and books which only a few people read – along comes the World Wide Web.

This was actually created (and here’s a further irony) so that academic researchers could share their findings across the Internet – doing so quickly and free from any commercial restrictions. If you write a paper on rocket science, you can put the results directly onto a web site and announce the fact to special interest groups. That way, you can invite feedback, critical comment, and peer review – and receive it fairly quickly, instead of having to wait up to two years as you would if the paper was put into the dinosaur production methods of commercial publishers.

Everyone loses as a result of this sequence of events: scientists are paying more in their time to obtain needed articles, libraries are paying higher subscription fees while providing less information, and because of this, their funders are concerned and sceptical about increased costs.

Publishers, on the other hand, are severely criticized, and they continue to lose subscribers, prestige, and the potential advertising revenue that accompanies higher circulation. In other words, the increased prices have resulted in a lose, lose, lose, lose situation for publishers, scientists, libraries, and their funders.

Scholarly journals take a long time to produce; they are very expensive; and very few people read them. Why bother then, when the same results can be made available fast, free of charge, and to a much wider audience? These are some of the fundamental issues underpinning this book. It’s an investigation into basic questions related to publishing in this form. How much does it cost? What are the trends in scholarly article authorship and readership? What are the overall implications of electronic journals to publishers, libraries, scientists, and their funders?

The argument on costs is overwhelming. Electronic publishing saves on printing costs, re-printing costs, storage costs, archiving, and inter-library loan costs. And all the other arguments return again and again to the obvious advantages of electronic publication. Yet Carol Tenopir and Donald King are no revolutionaries – in fact they are not even very radical.

They point out that readers both inside and outside universities will continue to demand materials in printed form. Which is true. It’s amazing how many people continue to print out documents – for the sake of convenience, and habit. And throughout the entire study they assume that the production of journals will be organised and conducted by commercial publishers, making charges for access and subscriptions. This might be true – for a while.

The information they assemble in answer to their own questions seems therefore to be provided as answers to the basic questions raised by this interesting cultural phenomenon.

It’s a study which is aimed at researchers, librarians, publishers, and anyone interested in electronic publication, and they go out of their way to provide hard evidence for decision-makers.

They offer a realistic examination of what scientists, publishers, and librarians can expect from scholarly journals, based on hard quantitative evidence. This provides revealing information with which to address such searching questions as:

  • Are printed journals worth saving?
  • What are the consequences of escalating journal prices?
  • Will electronic journals replace print journals?
  • What is the current readership of scientific journals – in both print and electronic form?
  • What are the costs of publishing in print and electronic form?

They go into the finest details of pricing, cost-per-reader, and variations of delivery – but it is all posited on the notion that ‘journals’ are most naturally available in printed form. The details even include the history of scholarly journals; subsidies; and readership behaviour – including even the number of hours required to keep abreast of a subject.

If you are interested in one of the lesser-known but burgeoning forms of electronic publishing – then you should find this a rich source of hard facts for the debate. And if it’s a subject close to your academic heart, let me strongly urge you to read it in conjunction with Anne Okerson’s Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads in which the arguments for electronic publication and self-archiving were first made available in printed form.

© Roy Johnson 2001

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Carol Tenopir and Donald W. King, Towards Electronic Journals: Realities for Scientists, Librarians, and Publishers, Washington, DC: Special Libraries Association, 2000, pp.488, ISBN 0871115077

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Txtg: The Gr8 Db8

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text messaging analysed, described, and defended

Ever since Text messaging first began there have been moans and complaints that it was lowering standards of literacy, corrupting our youth, and bringing about the collapse of Western civilization. Even the normally rational John Sutherland, writing in the Guardian, complained about texting:

Linguistically, it’s all pigs ear … it masks dyslexia, poor spelling and mental laziness. Texting is penmanship for illiterates.

Txtg: The Gr8 Db8David Crystal has answers for every one of these common objections. Texting isn’t even that new: writing in abbreviated forms has been around for a long time. Other languages (such as Hebrew and Arabic) do not use vowels as part of their writing system. In actual fact, the amount of abbreviating and acronyms such as ROFL is quite small. And most convincing of all to me, users in other languages all follow more or less the same ‘rules’ for abbreviation.

What’s more, the use of pictograms and logographs have been around for a long time; the rebus or word puzzle is an ancient tradition in UK and other cultures; and reducing terms to their initial letters is deeply enshrined in our culture – as in pm, NATO, eg, asap, OK, and GHQ.

The same is true for omitting letters, or ‘clipping’ as it’s known technically. Mr and Mrs are cases in point. Any form of word shortening makes complete sense in an SMS system, and nobody has any problem failing to recognise Tues(day), approx(imately), biog(raphy), mob(ile), gov(ernment), poss(ible), and uni(versity.

Crystal has a good chapter on the amazing literary aspirations of the SMS poets and writers – people who compose haikus, short stories, and even serial novels using this extraordinarily restricted form.

In terms of users, women are more adept and enthusiastic than men, and another interesting feature he reveals is that text messaging was late to take off in the USA – for two reasons. One was that phone calls were cheaper there, and the other is that many people need to drive to get about, unlike European countries and Japan, where the country is smaller and more people use public transport.

The content of text messages varies from personal greetings and co-ordinating social activity to political electioneering, advertising, and even schemes to quit smoking. Crystal lists plenty of examples which I imagine will be good stimulus material for the A level students doing language projects who will find this book particularly useful.

At a more advanced level, he also looks at how other languages handle text messaging. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that all of them do more or less the same thing, though some even mix English abbreviations with their own language – which is called ‘code-mixing’. This is an example from German:

mbsseg = mail back so schnell es geht (‘as fast as you can’)

He ends by allaying the fears of all those who think text messaging lowers any kind of standards of literacy, or communication. In fact the reverse is true. And to prove that he’s done his homework he ends with a huge glossary of terms and multiple lists of text message abbreviations in eleven different languages. U cnt gt btr thn tht!

© Roy Johnson 2009

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David Crystal, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.256, ISBN: 0199571333

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Understanding Virtual Universities

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course design and construction for online learning

Teachers in higher education are under increasing pressure to develop novel methods of learning, to understand the latest developments in IT, and to make their courses available on line. The purpose of Understanding Virtual Universities is to help them gain an overview of what is involved. Roy Rada is very good at giving the overall picture – explaining the architecture of a university-wide learning program. He also describes in detail the courseware production cycle, and the role that individuals play in the process. He arranges his contents into four parts: virtual learning in relation to the student, the teacher, the administrator, and society in general. He explains the benefits of group and collaborative learning.

Understanding Virtual UniversitiesThis is undoubtedly fine in theory, but I sometimes felt that he didn’t take much account of real practice. My own experience suggests that students are often reluctant to engage in collaborative projects – particularly with people they hardly know. The most convincing example he describes is the group hypertext project on Tennyson’s In Memoriam – the long Victorian poem divided into sections to which are linked related documents, commentary, and criticism. This leaves behind a project which can still be accessed at the University of Virginia.

The experiments on which he reports make it quite clear that IT is most effective when it is combined with other, mixed learning activities in what he calls ‘studio’ classes. In this respect, I was rather surprised that he doesn’t cover any of the better-known Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) such as WebCT, Blackboard, and Learnwise.

For any teachers thinking of developing such courseware there are some detailed reports on the testing and results achieved – in courses ranging from Geography to ‘Design and Analysis of Algorithms.’ There’s a chapter on the history of teaching methods which I feared might be boring but which offered a fascinating survey, ranging from ancient Egypt to Web-based archives in the modern university.

He also includes a consideration of which subjects are best served by online courses – and he even looks the funding and cost-benefits of online learning, as well as the consequences of pursuing these innovations at the same time as maintaining quality assurance.

This leads into a consideration of the IT systems educational organisations need to have in place to deal with student records, finance, and administration. He then explores the partnerships and collaborative schemes between education and businesses which are providing courses for employees in the workplace. This also includes a consideration of revenue opportunities in the form of consultancies, franchises, and specialist publishing.

His range is wide, and he is very well informed. If there’s a weakness it’s that he flits around from one topic to another rather quickly, never exploring any issue in depth. But that’s also the strength of the book, because he cover all aspects of running Web-based learning in an institution. Many people might have a deep knowledge of one aspect of Web-based learning, but few people have an overview.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Roy Rada, Understanding Virtual Universities, Bristol: Intellect, 2001, pp.122, ISBN: 1841500526

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Universal Design for Web Applications

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an introduction to the study of sign systems

Universal design is a general principle, but it’s used here as something of a coded term for two topics which are discussed in detail. One is designing for accessibility (people with disabilities) and the other is designing for a variety of devices – PCs, laptops, PDAs, and most challenging of all, for mobile phones. The argument is that more people fall into the disability category than is generally realised, and that for huge numbers of users the mobile device is now the principal means of accessing Internet services.

Universal Design Fail to take these two factors into account, and you are automatically falling behind in providing what users want. The first important piece of advice these authors offer is that you should separate content from presentation in everything you design. This means using HTML in the way it was originally intended for use. Tables are for presenting tabular data, the <OL> feature for ordered lists, and so on. The <FONT> tag should now be abandoned altogether, and replaced by the use of cascading style sheets (CSS).

They are quite adamantly against using tables for layout, and think CAPTCHAs ought to be banned altogether: (those are the pictures of text you’re supposed to read to prove that you’re a human being, not a spambot).

If you’re using tables correctly however, they have a lot of useful tips for adding information in the form of captions and summaries. The same goes for making streamed video accessible for disabled users.

They explain the three different approaches to this issue: to offer audio or text transcripts, subtitles, or captions. These are time-consuming and therefore expensive to provide – but anyone who claims their web presence is designed for maximum usability to cater for all users needs to be aware of these features and incorporate them into their work.

I wonder how many of the self-righteous sites claiming full usability would pass scrutiny in this regard? Certainly not my local town council, whose site boasts full accessibility – but doesn’t even include email addresses and hides behind a general menu option telephone answering service. And after you’ve left your message, they ‘guarantee’ to get back to you within ten days. Some promise!

The latter chapters of the book cover working with scripts (Ajax) to produce dropdown menus that are accessible even for people using the keyboard for navigation – though when I went to look at an open source menu script they claim to have put on the book’s web site (http://ud4wa.com) there was nothing available.

They finish by explaining how most of these procedures can be pursued using a content management system (CMS) with templates and style sheets. Finally, as you might expect, they offer checklists for making sure your content matches up to what’s required, and resources for implementing features that cover magnification of text, scrolling, multimedia, screen readers, and full HTML validation of your output.

© Roy Johnson 2008

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Wendy Chisholm and Matt May, Universal Design for Web Applications, Sebastopol (CA), 2008, pp.179, ISBN 0596518738

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Upgrading and Repairing PCs

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best-selling comprehensive guide to computer hardware

Scott Mueller’s title here is too modest. Upgrading and Repairing PCs is not just a repair guide – it’s a major encyclopaedia of computer components, their specifications, and a workshop manual on all aspects of dealing with PC hardware. His approach is very simple – and extremely thorough. He describes each major component of a PC in separate chapters, explains how it works, what it does, and even how it is made. You can use this manual for either an explanation of how things function, or for an up-to-date account of technical component specifications. It covers building, maintaining, and repairing all parts of a PC. It’s an approach which works – which is what has made this book a best-seller.

Upgrading and Repairing PCsAll the major manufacturers chips, motherboards, memory, hard drives, and peripherals are covered – so this is a valuable resource if you want to make comparisons before ordering new equipment. There’s even a comprehensive list of suppliers, plus advice on making choices.

The book also comes with a CD containing two hours of video tutorials. These are in fairly plain MP3 files. The process of installing components is described well enough in the book, but it’s made infinitely clearer when shown on screen.

He even shows you how to assemble your own PC – delivering the information in a fluent and cheerful manner. It occurred to me that these clips are also excellent tutorials for those who would like to know what’s inside their PC, but who don’t want to go though the heart-stopping experience of opening up the box.

The majority of the data here is very technical. This is a serious, heavy-duty book which has proved itself in the best-seller lists. It is now in its thirteenth edition and is just about as up-to-date as it’s possible to be. This is somebody who knows his subject inside-out.

© Roy Johnson 2009

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Scott Mueller, Upgrading and Repairing PCs, Indianapolis (IN): Que, 19th edition, 2009, pp.1176, ISBN: 0789739542

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Using Drupal

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Configuring Modules to Build Dynamic Websites

Drupal is the most powerful, industrial-strength option amongst the open source content management systems (Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress). But it’s notoriously difficult to configure and manipulate. Hence the up-front sub-title to this publication. The answers to the problems have been supplied by designers creating plug-in modules which deliver separate functions. These all sit on top of the Drupal core.

Using DrupalThe user is left with ‘only’ the task of getting these modules to work together. And as anyone who has tried it will tell you, it’s no mean task. That’s where this guidance manual comes in. It takes you through a selection of the most basic add-on modules you’ll need to get a site up and running.

It’s written with the latest version of Drupal in mind (6.0) and you should be warned that modules written for other versions (5.0 and earlier) are not compatible with the latest version, and visa versa.

The other warning which needs to be flagged up as a major hazard and frustration is that configuration settings in one module might have a global effect, affecting your tweakings in another module, or even wiping it out altogether.

Fortunately there’s a very useful introduction which explains how a content management system works and the differences between first, second, and third generation web sites. You need to get used to lots of the specialised terms which are employed in this form of technology – modules, themes, and nodes – and you’ll have to let go of comforting terms such as folders and pages, because they just don’t apply any more.

In my experience of CMS systems, these naming conventions can be very confusing. Articles become stories, and features become modules or blocks. So you need to grit your teeth and just take on the new language.

The good thing about this book is that there are full instructions on adding and configuring modules that add functionality to a site. The creation of basic content is quite a complex business – partly because it’s assumed that a site will be fully interactive, and its materials can be tagged, commented upon, and served up in different forms. That’s why you end up arranging the content from a control panel with lots of options and settings.

There’s another reason why this approach to development by configuring modules is important. That’s because, rather surprisingly, the basic Drupal core does not include such fundamentals as a text editor and image manipulation tools. These have to be bolted on as extras. But free open source solutions are listed at the end of every chapter.

Separate chapters of the book have been written by open source evangelists, and the success of their approach is reflected in several five-star reviews for this book at Amazon. They concentrate on a wide range of third party modules which have been created by the Drupal community. This means the modules have been devised to solve real life problems and requirements.

The book is also arranged as a series of projects, showing how Drupal can be used to build a commercial web site; a job postings notice board; a product reviews site; a Wiki; a photo gallery; and an event management site. They explain how to use the most important modules, the content creator’s kit (CCK), categorise materials with Taxonomy, and use the Views module to arrange the display of content in a variety of user-selected forms.

The range and scope of sites built with Drupal in this book is truly impressive – from multi-language sites to eCommerce shopping sites using the Ubercart module. Full details of the all the software used is listed for every chapter, and there’s a very strong sense throughout that you are taking part in a community activity – where ideas, work, and results are shared.

O’Reilly took quite some time getting this, their first Drupal manual onto the shelves, but the wait has been worth it. I wonder when they will do the same thing for Joomla?

© Roy Johnson 2009

Using Drupal   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Using Drupal   Buy the book at Amazon US

Angela Byron et al, Using Drupal, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2008, pp.464, ISBN: 0596515804

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