Ask Freelock

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?

Mavis asks,

I have already spent thousands of dollars on my [Zen Cart] website. What would be your advice for [a company] who wants to transfer their site to a new host but not redesign it?

Just like a physical store, the costs of running an e-commerce site very quickly exceed the costs of opening it. And any time you're handling money, you automatically become a target for thieves -- you need to take security seriously, or you're bound to get robbed.

A question came across the Drupal Developer's list today asking whether Drupal could auto-update itself, like WordPress. As someone who thinks about security a lot, the very thought of this horrifies me.

It's a bad idea for several reasons, but the biggest reason:

It could easily lead to the biggest most powerful bot-net on the planet.

This could just as easily happen to WordPress, too. It already has, in fact, to a small extent.

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.

Wesley at The Nubby Admin asks,

Drupal you say? I’m not too mid-stream to change horses if there’s a good reason to do so. If Ubercart has great digital content delivery features and the ability to sell URLs (and obfuscate the real directory structure), then I’d be all ears.

Oh, and your “About Freelock” page and subpages ROCK THE HECK OUT! =)

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...

Mel asks:

Why would I use Drupal instead of Microsoft Expression Web to create a website?

I actually had to look to find out what Expression Web is--I hadn't heard of it before. It looks like a successor to FrontPage, something similar to DreamWeaver for creating static web sites.

So to rephrase, why should I build a site on a content management system, instead of using a tool that lets me build a site directly?

Damon Cortesi ( @dacort ) over at Untitled Startup recently wrote up a summary of recurring payment services provided for startups. It's a decent analysis of current payment services that offer a hosted recurring billing solution, if you don't have a merchant account or want to handle your own e-commerce. If you're writing a software-as-a-service platform from the ground up, and would like to outsource the payment side of things, these are good options.

There are basically 3 models for getting web applications built:

• Proprietary platform
• Custom code
• Open Source