Testing out what Drupal books and pages are. I start off by using Create Content >> Submit Book Page.

Once I created the book I used the "add child" link at the bottom of the page to add a page to the book.

After that I added another page to the book using the same method.

I then added a child page to the first page, which resulted in some weird navigation, so I decied to delete the child of the first page. However, I manged instead to delete my very first page when I meant to delete it's child page.

Once I added a first page back I wanted to change the order of the pages. There isn't any simple page ordering functionality, you have to use "weight" to do this by putting the page you want first with a lesser weight, etc. To get the second page to show before the first I gave the second a weight of "1" and the first a weight of "3". I guess this is the basic Drupal methodolgy for ordering things. Just to state the obvious, this will work better with smaller books. For a book with 10 pages the weights (which go from -10 to 10 for me on this very page) is plenty. For a book with 100 pages it would be limited. I read a bit about this on the Drupal site, and it seems like this is a common complaint. There might be help on this coming with Drupal version 6.

My next goals for this book were to add a photo to a page, and then add the book to the left nav menu. These turned out to be fairly simple. Adding the images was as easy as using the little "Image Assist" icon. (It's a green plus sign with a little photo show askew) I added that module a while ago, and I don't think any image stuff is in core, so you would have to add whatever image functionality you want. There are a bunch of options when adding a photo, like size and placement, so I'll have to play around with that some more before I understand all of my ascetic options.

Adding the book to the menu was exceedingly easy, I just used the menu settings box near the bottom of the edit page. I just added a title of "Testing a Drupal Book", a description of "Testing out what it takes to create, add to, and alter a Book in Drupal.", and a parent item of navigation. Very easy.

While the ordering of pages isn't as flexible as I would like, it seems the parent / child flexibilty is very good. Not only can you add a child page pretty much anywhere, you can also change the parent for any page. This means that if you have a page with a lot of children, and you want to break it up some, you can. You could either add another page at the same level as the parent to move some of those children to, or you could create a few new child pages to be used as sub sections for the parent, and then more the original child pages under the new pages. Ether way, lots of flexibility.