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. A superficial look at Joomla led us to believe that its content management interface was needlessly complicated for the types of sites we had in mind, and for the customers who would be using it. End user ease-of-use was our most important consideration, followed by design and development flexibility. In this regard, Drupal looked to us like it was a more elaborate implementation of the things we liked about XOOPS. So, we both planned to investigate Drupal further in the near future. I had my eye on Pro Drupal Development , but my friend is a designer and David Mercer's book looked more appropriate