Chapter 1. Planning our Site and Setting up Drupal

Although several books have been written about Drupal 7, most have been written for developers to help them program sites using Drupal coding standards, enhance sites by using custom modules, and change the appearance of Drupal sites by using themes. In this book, we take a different approach. Throughout the book, we will develop a website for a (fictional) business and meet the needs of this business.

We have included an explanation of all the key features in Drupal that most small-to-medium-sized businesses would want to use on their sites. A thorough step-by-step description of how to integrate each piece of functionality into your website is included, along with an explanation of the business need that is being satisfied by using the functionality.

After reading this book, you will be able to adapt the techniques used in this book to either develop a site for your company on your own, or work with a development firm to create a website that truly meets the needs of your business.

In this chapter, we will introduce our client, the Artisan Bakers Collective and discuss their plans to build a website. We will also introduce Drupal 7 and describe why it is a good fit for our client's website.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Plans for the Artisan Bakers Collective website

• The advantages and disadvantages of simple, static web pages

• Advantages and disadvantages of customized PHP and MySQL sites

• Deciding on Drupal for building the website

• Getting started with Drupal