Recently, a friend that I commonly sub-contract with purchased a few copies of Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites by David Mercer, and he sent one to me. Although I initially thought that I wouldn’t get much out of this book–as its intended audience is non-technical–I read it. It was a free gift after all. And, I was pleasantly surprised by how informative I found it. Over the past few years, my friend and I have co-created a few simple content managed Web sites using XOOPS, as we both appreciated its bare-bones framework and the ease with which it could be customized. But during that time, both Joomla and Drupal have been getting a lot of attention and seeming mindshare in the PHP community, so we started exploring these options to try to insure our customers’ sites against the future.