Growing Venture Solutions

I recently saw a comment about Pathauto and started writing a really long reply that seemed more valuable to share here.

Basically one of the questions people have is “Why should I use Pathauto? If I don’t care about SEO is there any other reason?”

This is a valid question to me. There is some indication that users don’t look at the URL bar. During the Usability testing at UMN we never noticed people looking at the URL bar in the eye-tracking data. But some people certainly do look at the URL bar - people who like “hackable urls” do

Hackable URLs

I use it extensively to create “hackable URLs” that are valuable to a user. A “hackable url” or “index alias” is the feature on a site where you have a post and then users can remove the title down to the previous URL element and get the other posts from that month, one more layer for the year, and one more for that user since forever. See - fun! I even made a movie about it:

Site Credibility Prior to the Click

I frequently get URLs sent to me via email and IM. Compare these two URLs:

http://drupalcampcolorado.org/node/38

vs.

http://drupalcampcolorado.org/content/our-sponsors

Which one are you more likely to click on? Which one helps you understand what content you are going to get before you even get there?

Easy to Remember URLs

Ever quarter I try to munge and analyze the download data. The data for January is now available. Views continues its reign at the top of the module list. Images and WYSIWYG remain popular. Popular themes continue to be dominated by those that start with letters at the beginning of the alphabet.

Most Popular Drupal Modules

These are the slides from the security presentation. Visit the s5 version to see them as a presentation.

The Pathauto module is a rather popular one for Drupal. In November Pathauto 5.x-2.0 was released which included a restructuring of several features to add new features and enhance scalability. There have been almost 50 bugfixes and features added between 5.x-2.0 and 5.x-2.1. See the release page for full details.

I wanted to blog about this for a few reasons.

Pathauto Configuration/UI Changes

First, there was a change to the UI in the way that feed aliases are handled to better support the use of Views for taxonomy feeds. I’ve udpated this in the upgrade guide (which, especially for folks upgrading from 5.x-1 or 4.7, should be required reading). There were also several improvements to the UI to simplify it and help people figure out which token is the right one to use. This was a major problem with the 2.0 release so I hope that the 2.1 will be easier to use. There is still room for improvements but…

Comaintainer and Maintenance Status

Second, this release is likely to be the last for a while. Now that this 5.x branch is more stable I plan to spend some time working on the 6.x branch to get a stable release of that. I’d also love a co-maintainer which mikeryan has offered to help which would take the module full circle to its author. I’m broadcasting this here to be a responsible maintainer given that I have less bandwidth in the coming months to dedicate to Pathauto because…

Prediction Market Module

Drupal Project Module History and Future

The Drupal Project Module is one of the oldest non-core modules that is still in active development and use on sites around the world. The core developers of Drupal are committed to using this module as the controller for “projects” hosted on Drupal itself. There are many people who like Drupal and want to use it to create a system for hosting projects. Two such projects that I’m aware of include the QCodo QForge and the future plans for JQuery.com as mentioned in the Lullabot podcast 21: interview with JQuery founder John Resig.

Help the Project Module Move Forward

Because the Project module is so old, it did things in ways that are not standard for Drupal. This makes it relatively unpopular for use on other sites as it lacks several important features. There are several particularly nasty bugs and Derek Wright (dww) has signed up to maintain Project module and tackle these bugs so that the Project module will get more attention and use around the world. More attention means more improvements, which means that one of the key pieces of Drupal’s infrastructure can really start to shine and enable development rather than being a “I guess we have to use it” kind of feature.

So, if you use Drupal you should want to help the project module. It’s important. It’s a feature that lots of people want, and it has someone interested in making it better. Derek has setup a page explaining this in more detail and you are encouraged to give him more money. Read more about his plan and follow the link to donate. As of writing, Derek is at a little over $1000. That’s a great start, but still pretty far from the desired end point.

Growing Venture Solutions, LLC gave funds thing to help with the process and to make sure that this module moves forward. Won’t you do the same?

I recently got an email asking me this question:

A quick question about Drupal, Civic Space and Joomla and other PHP Open Source CMS?

Why choose Drupal over Civic Space? Why Drupal over Joomla/Mambo? Or PHP Nuke?

Which is easier for a novice to use? I’ve checked http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ and http://opensourcecms.com/ to learn and I’ve talked to one developer who is a big fan of PHP Nuke…

This is an interesting question for me. Personally I have only used a handful of content management systems and I’ve built a handful of similar tools from the ground up. But I’m very clearly a Drupal consultant at this point, so how did I get here and why Drupal? Now that I’m using and endorsing Drupal, is that the right decision? Is there reason to stay?

The Nuke Series

The first Open Source CMS I used was PostNuke - a member of the Nuke family of forks and hacks - and it worked pretty well. It gave me integration with Gallery, which I really liked, and it seemed to work pretty well. I had also used phpBB and while I liked it, it was clear that phpBB was more or less just a forum system and it was a security riddled one at that. When I needed to integrate Gallery and phpBB with Postnuke to get the functionality I wanted, and then I added a calendar which crashed the whole thing….I knew that something wasn’t right. Many many megabytes of code that wasn’t intended to work together and, not surprisingly, doesn’t work together.

At the same time I tried getting help in the forum and was surprised by how weak the support was. I tried to ask my question as intelligently as I could and tried to help myself, but the response was really weak. That ended it. On to find something new, that included lots of functions, and that had an active community of support with major sites using the software. I wanted to know that other tech luminaries were using the product.

Finding Something New

At this point I had some certainty that I wanted to make a good decision on the software because I was pretty sure I was going to become a freelancer and stake my livelihood on the product. So, what to choose. Since I don’t know the needs of my customers other than flexible, “quick to market”, and reliable I went with those requirements. I then tried out Mambo and Drupal and looked at their communities and the software. I found them similarly easy to use, but Drupal struck me with the relatively large number of features supported out of the box and the powerful Taxonomy system. I looked around and noticed one or two of the sites that I visit were using Drupal to do drastically different things and that pretty much sealed the deal. I started using Drupal, posting questions in the forum, having problems still but at least being able to resolve them. Since that time Mambo/Joomla has forked (or I became aware of it, maybe) which makes me glad I didn’t choose a project with an unknown future.

Confirmations All Around

Now that I’m here, is there good reason to keep using Drupal? I think so. IBM thinks so. Spike Source thinks so - Drupal is the only CMS or Community Building Framework that they support.SongBird thinks so. SnowBoard Magazine thinks so. Linux Journal thinks so, and wrote a case study on their move from PHP Nuke. Forrester Research thinks so, if you are looking for a blogging platform and “have open source experience and want blogs to be an integrated part of a publishing and community platform” - well, that’s the vision that I bring to most of my clients because I believe Newsletters (aka Blogging) are a cost-effective marketing tool.

Two Images to Say It All

Here’s an image comparing Drupal to the other Content Management Systems based upon IBM’s review:

And here is the Forrester Map of the Corporate Blogging Platforms that they reviewed:

Drupal, WordPress, and Movable Type are the only three that are in both reviews, which says something in itself about popularity and credibility if not usability and feature sets. While IBM’s developerWorks clearly favored Drupal as a CMS, Forrestor favors it only if it fits with your goal for your Corporate Blog as being a part of a community.

It’s almost as interesting to me what these don’t show: anything from the Nuke series.

That’s how I arrived at Drupal, and it’s also why I think that for at least the forseeable future it’s a good piece of software to be working with.

So, one of the ideas that I’ve latched onto and advised my customers (and prospective customers) to do is a “corporate blog”.

Corporate Blogging - Friend or Foe

Businessweek and Fortune and all those junky business magazines are telling you that maybe it’s a good idea, but also that it can be bad and blah blah blah.

Why the heck is it a bad idea to 1) with a low cost in terms of money and time 2) communicate your message to your customers 3) engage customers in a dialog about your service/product 4) help future customers find you—since blogs will help you get links and search engine results 5) have a little fun!

Well, I was reading an article on Kuro5hin that describes how to bootstrap a “web company” in 2 months and they had this great line about raising venture capital:

Now there are tons of articles out there on how to attract cash if you have an idea so I’m not going to go into it because we didn’t go that route and to be honest all those articles seem like bullshit written by some 40 year old guy that thinks he’s hip because he has a hosted blog.

So, the venture capital part is interesting, but the part that struck me was the part that I put in bold above. If you have a website and then create your own blog for yourself on blogger and then stick a link between them it’s going to look cheap, it’s not going to have the right theme, and after many many hours of your work it’s still going to look like a cheap and disjointed separate part of the site. Your customers are not going to be excited and it won’t help you gain credibility, links, or search engine results.

But how do I do “corporate blogging” the RIGHT way

Well, step one is to have a decent website from the beginning. Which, if you’re like most small businesses it was an afterthought that you either got your nephew to do or you hired someone for too much who did too little and getting them to help any more is a real pain.

Motivation

If you ask anybody that uses it, RSS feeds change the way that people get their news updates, monitor dynamic websites, stay up to date with a forum, and generally get information. Occasionally my wife asks me how I know all the things I know and I seriously credit spending an hour in the morning with my 50+ RSS feeds reading news. Whether it’s the life and times of Trae or it’s a feed that tracks new Drupal modules - RSS feeds are the major way that I get my regular dose of new information.

The major problem with RSS feeds - along with many bleeding edge Web2.0 technologies - is that while the 53,651 may follow them, they aren’t nearly as useful to “my mom”. Well mom, this Movie’s for you.

Background

In this movie I visit a site built with the Drupal CMS where different posts to the site get added into categories. These categories are available to everyone, but how do you know if there is new content? One way is to use the RSS feeds for each category. Using these feeds and a piece of software called a “feed reader” you can regularly check many websites for updated content. I use two different feed readers that are available to a very wide audience: the Mozilla Firefox browser and the Google Feed Reader.