Drupal

Why do websites get hacked? Websites get hacked for a bunch of different reasons:

We've had several clients recently chafing at how confining Drupal sites can be -- it can be a lot more work to make individual pages vary from the template, and if you have build web sites using a tool like Dreamweaver, you can't tweak the layout the same way.

We call these hand-built sites brochure, or static, because they are a collection of files you build once, and then don't change very often. Drupal is a Content Management System (CMS), a program that helps you manage content.

So what's the difference? Why would you want Drupal over a static brochure site?

We have several customers interested in adding CRM to their Drupal sites, so today I hopped on a conference call with a working group developing CRM tools for Drupal 7. It's a small group, but it sounds like they are making good progress with the Party module, to serve as glue between all the various items that might end up in your database, to de-duplicate and associate them as a single entity.

The question is, what is CRM, and why build another in Drupal?

At Freelock, we're huge fans of Drupal. But we keep running into customers (or potential customers) who are terrified of it. So here's our take on why.

5. I just want a web site! It's too complicated!

Drupal is not just another web site builder. In experienced hands, it's easy for a Drupal developer to spin up a simple web site on Drupal -- I've done it in a matter of a couple hours, complete with initial content. But if you're not experienced with Drupal, the learning curve to get something useful is steep.

Short answer: it depends.

We still do most of our projects in Drupal 6, mainly because it's been around a few years, and modules we use on many sites are not yet stable for Drupal 7 (and some are still a ways off).

However, for sites that don't need particular modules, Drupal 7 at its core is a nice improvement.

My first Drupal 7 site is a personal one, http://www.hikeswithhazel.com. So far as a user, it doesn't seem that different from Drupal 6, especially if you turn off the "Overlay" module which pops open editing screens in what I find to be a highly annoying way.

Mike asks,

I came across your site as i'm a member of NWEN.  My current site is built on a wordpress template and I want to change it as it's pretty rough.  What are the pros/cons of having a site built with Drupal vs. word press?

The simple answer is, WordPress is for designers, and Drupal is for engineers. Kind of.

Like any simple answer, that's only part of the story.

Drupal provides powerful tools that makes it easy to do all sorts of changes to your web site, but one change is difficult: changing the content type of a node after you've created it.

In general, once you create an item of a certain type, you cannot change that type without breaking it. But for one project, we needed to do exactly that.

You launched your Drupal site yesterday, and it's not on the front page of Google. What do you do now? One of our clients asked us about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) recently, so I thought I'd share some advice from our experience.

First of all, getting organic search results takes time. It doesn't happen overnight, and you're lucky if you're findable on popular terms within the first couple months. Why? Because...

URLs are a critical part of all web sites, not just Drupal. However, in Drupal, the URL of a page determines a lot about how the page is built.

Did you notice? The world's a different place. Rules for doing business have changed—there's new ways of getting hired, finding employees, reaching new customers, and (shudder) for them to reach you. Economies of scale have flipped—it's getting more expensive to do things on a huge scale, and far cheaper to do them at a micro scale. Mass market items have lost their appeal, and people yearn for authentic, individual connections in a world of franchise same-ness.

TerraBella Flowers - Organic Florist in Seattle

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terrabellaflowers.com

TerraBella Flowers & Mercantile specializes in European garden-style designs, using an assortment of local, organic, and sustainably grown flowers and is based in the Greenwood neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. A longtime customer, we have seen the highs and lows of this site.

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