Features

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.

All the planning and preparation in the world won't prevent an incident, but it can greatly reduce the consequences.

Nothing better prepares you for responding to disaster than experience. In the world of web applications, sometimes we act as firefighters, coming in to rescue the smoldering remains of a hacked site, a crashed server, or an unexpected traffic burst.

No matter how diligent you are at preventing vulnerabilities and securing your environment, it's impossible to be completely secure on the Internet. What you can do is plan for how to limit the damage that people can do when they manage to compromise some part of your system. This line of thinking is called "Defense in depth" -- you can't just apply security updates and call it good.

It amazes me that still in 2011, the standard way web designers upload code to a server is FTP ("File transfer protocol"), a protocol that is completely insecure, easy to snoop, slow, hard to use, and often problematic through firewalls. There are many better ways.

Backups are the safety net and an absolute requirement. But the next most important part is doing what you can to stay out of trouble. We've all become accustomed to security updates on our computers. Today every operating system has an update system, and a huge number of attacks are on vulnerabilities that have fixes released but people have neglected to apply.

At Freelock, we don't think one backup is enough. All kinds of things can, and often do go wrong. Murphy was an optimist, after all.

How would losing your web site affect your business?

That might seem like a silly question, but a surprising number of small organizations don't think it can happen to them. Think again -- web sites get lost all the time, through a variety of means. The server hosting your site might have a hardware failure. Your site might get hacked. Your web developer might accidentally delete something critical. Your host might go out of business, leaving you stranded. If you're in the tech world, you hear about these incidents all the time.

After receiving multiple requests for a follow-up to my anti-Twitter rant a few months back, I've decided to try and do just that. While my overall position on Twitter has not changed one bit, I have been closely watching the Tw-efforts of many businesses as they attempt to turn Tweets into cash.

So what did my investigation yield?

[Originally published on the Open Source Small Business blog, in January 2008.]

I’ve seen a lot of code in various languages. As a technical writer, I used to write documentation for programmers teaching them how to use a particular interface or system. I’ve been involved with traditional software development projects at large software companies and startups. And I’ve done my share of actual programming of web applications.