Must have Drupal Modules for community websites is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

Drupal is a great piece of software and the true power in it lies in the open source community of developers building and enhancing the core features with regular updates and possibly more so the even larger community of module developers who custom create solutions for common problems and needs amongst the Drupal community.

While building out some projects with Drupal recently I came up with my favorite list of must have modules for community oriented websites and I thought to share them here. To begin with you’ll want to enable the full package of core modules including Comments, Blogs, Forums and Profile. Remember this is for community websites where you’ll have members sign up and join your website to interact with your site content and other members. You can’t do that so well without these core features enabled. There are also a number of great modules any Drupal site could use such as CCK for content creation and Views for properly formatted content display. These are not required for a community website although I find it hard to build out a nice site without them but that’s all covered in our last article.

These Drupal Modules make developing a robust community easier and more user friendly and should be considered must have for great websites.

Advanced Forum and the suggested contributed modules are must have for anyone developing forums on Drupal for a number of reasons but most of all is the ease of styling and modifications of the core forum module. Advanced Forum is about the only forum specific module that does much of anything except for maybe Forum Access which is not truly necessary if you understand how to use Roles and Permissions properly.

DiscussThis is a super cool module which should actually be a part of core if you ask me. It replicates existing behavior in the Drupal Blog It feature by allowing you to add links under select Content Types which create a forum topic for discussion of the article. It does lack over the built in Blog it function which actually propagates article content and title but it makes a best effort at carrying on discussions about site content.

Facebook Socials is a must have for any site hoping to tap into the social network powerhouse where a hit website can make or break you. By allowing your site readers to syndicate your content on the world largest social media destination you are tapping into one of the largest communities online and a potential for unlimited website traffic and member sign ups.

Gmap / Location Gmap is a mapping module which requires the Location Module so thaty the two can be used to provide address lookup and GPS location for Node Types and Users. The included Gmap Macro allows you to build a unique map of Node and User Locations which are great for finding out where your community members live and play.

IMCE is an excellent file upload tool which helps facilitate proper file sharing of everything from text files and pictures to music and movie files. The built in file browser helps community users upload and share content with other site members which is of course a great way for friends and relationships to build.

Twitter is the micro blogging sensation and social network powerhouse for people with 140 characters worth of attention span that has taken the web by storm. I understand even the President of The United States and the President of Russia communicate via private tweets these days. Letting your community members syndicate their site input makes for a great marketing tool

User Relationships and User Points are modules suggested for use by the makers of Advanced Forum which are so cool you could use them as stand alone modules without the cool styling effects of Advanced Forum. User Points is a cool tool for building community content by paying points for site interaction including points for each image, blog post and forum topic submitted. User Relationships are great for letting members become friends and is managed similar to BuddyList as used in most other forums or communities.

Zina is not necessary for all community sites but it is an excellent music sharing module and a must have for any community based on entertainment or media. the built in MP3 player offers podcasting support and is an excellent tool for the music website developer.

There are of course a zillion great Drupal modules and you might have some sugggestions for those that I have missed but these include what I would call core features for community based websites.

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Top 10 List of must have Drupal Contributed Modules is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

Ok, so as a follow up to my last two articles on Drupal I thought I would put together one of those silly Top 10 lists of must have contributed modules. I say contributed modules because I think they core modules fall outside of these in that you have to actually download and install them separately and they are generally created and managed by the community at large. I’ll call it a list but in no particular order. I don;t think anyone of these is so much more important than the others and to be honest i don’t feel you can have a great website without using all 10.

CCK and Embedded Media Field are must have modules for quality content development and they are important for building blocks of other modules which use CCK fields throughout the site in almost everything. CCK is becoming a standard for use in module development and is bound someday to be part of core Drupal. Embedded Media Field is a must have for incorporating third party content such as pictures, audio and video files from sites such as Hulu, YouTube, Picasa and Flickr which of course makes for such a nice website.

Views is most likely one of the more important of these modules because it serves the purpose of allowing custom displaying of website content and unique site layouts. Views is important as a base module for many others which incorporate Views code for better site navigation and content distribution.

Tokens work with Triggers to produce Actions which help manage site content and needs. Tokens are used by quite a few other modules and helps webmasters manage site functions and features more easily,

SWF Tools is an all around media whiz suited for adding music, movies and photos to your blog posts. SWFTools turns your website into a full fledge media powerhouse capable of supporting almost any type of media there is.

Chaos Tool Suite is one of those tools that others use to build upon and it doesn’t actually do much on its own but you will find it hard to build a great site without it because so many other great plugins use it as a library of functions.

Date and Calendar are both important for obvious reasons including the site wide Calendar as well as scheduling and other date time related functions. It’s hard to manage a website without a suite of tools like these.

Image, Image Assist and Image Crop offer some features which are actually covered by other modules listed above but these are great for simple sites where you just want your users to add or import images or for anyone looking for total control over image dimensions and properties.

Location module provides geotargeting for users and content allowing you to tag blog posts, images and other content types with GPS locations. Location is great as a stand along module or also used by a number of other great modules like Gmap and User Locations.

Facebook Share or Facebook Social and Twitter are great for content websites who want their members to share content on the webs largest social networks and the number one way for marketing websites beyond the search engines. I add either on the FB modules because sadly the two don’t play well together and you have to chose one over the other. Facebook Share is straight forward and easy to use while Facebook Social is a bit trickier to install but offers much better features. Twitter does a fine job of syndicating your blog posts but it lacks in integration with Drupal login which is such a bummer.

Ok so there are actually more than 10 modules listed here but some go hand in hand with others and should be considered one module for the purposes of this list. You can build a website without any of these but you can’t build a great website without all of them.

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Lower costs mean big business for developers in Silicon Prairie is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

I came to realize long ago that the secret to my business was that I needed to streamline all costs involved so my profit levels were 100% and I actually kept all of the money I ever took in without having to spend much of anything for the return other than some sweat equity and hard work. Living in a city like Fort Lauderdale had its advantages for some time but as I realized the high cost of living there was a damper on my ability to grow we started looking elsewhere to cut costs and after some math and budget adjustments I was able to figure out we could actually move to Jamaica and live like life were a vacation when compared to what it cost us to live I Florida.

The cost of things in Florida was so much more than life in Jamaica that we actually kept more of the money we made each month running my business online with a laptop and satellite internet connection. now the trend is for startups to take off in lower cost areas like Kansas which has become the new “Silicon Prairie” for many developers and tech industry players who want an edge over the high cost of startups in a developed urban area. What this will do for integrating tech industry into the mainstream of America remains to be seen but it is certain to make a change to small cities like Kansas and even Fort Lauderdale for that matter.

Techies reject coasts for ‘Silicon Prairie’ – CNN.co

Midwestern tech is coming into its own. Jeff Slobotski produces an event called Big Omaha that includes more than 500 of the region’s workers from Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas and Iowa. The annual event just took place in May.

“We’ve got a real healthy and growing community,” said Slobotski, innovation director at the AIM Institute — a nonprofit membership organization for IT leadership.

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SEO your Drupal website is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

Use Blocks for Content Distribution and Drupal SEO

So in my last article I talked about my new favorite open source software application for web development and I posted my review of Drupal CMS. Now I have to admit I love Drupal but it is weak in just about everything and SEO is definitely non existent in a generic fresh install but that may be a good thing in the end when you consider what you can accomplish with a little hard work and determination. Having a full and complete understanding o Drupal and al lit’s many features is certainly important for everything but even more so with SEO and search engine marketing in general. Knowing the difference between Blog posts, Book pages and Aggregator content can make or break your SEO on a Drupal site.

Drupal is raw and you need to do a lot of work to get up and running but once you get it going it is a sweet piece of free software and a great tool for building SEO ready websites. Understanding what kind of site you are building and your content sources really helps in getting started on your Drupal SEO and knowing what the site goals are and who the end users are are of great benefit. The first thing you want to do when you SEO a Drupal site is to sort out your Content Types, Vocabulary and desired Taxonomy which will lead to Meta Tag formats and URL Alias for the base layout of a site optimized for search engines. Because you have to set all details for your Drupal site such as Url Alias and Taxonomy Breadcrumb for search engine optimization you need first to understand your content layout and whether how you use Vocabulary tools and Tags or you could end up with a complete mess.

drupal pathauto settings

SEO with Drupal requires a number of modules such as PathAuto and Token for creating proper URL format as well as FeedAPI and News Page if you intend on syndicating content from other sites without paying a duplicate content penalty with Google. You will need to install Nodewords Module and Page Title Module for proper Meta Tags, Global Redirect for formatted URL alias and 301 redirects and you will need to enable Core features such as Path, Taxonomy and Menu for those to work.

On my site i use FeedAPI and News Page modules to import RSS feed content from other sites. I import the content as Story with proper reference to the original site on the News Page. I then link to it with a teaser in blockquotes on my Blog with additional fresh content from commentary that my bloggers create which spins the original article into unique website content. My next step is the use of Nodewords Module and Page Title Module for unique in page meta tags while using custom PathAuto settings to output the correct URL for SEO keyword inclusion. Here is where understanding your content payout helps because formatting URL’s based on Vocabulary and taxonomy can be a hassle.

Your PathAuto Rules will determine your final URL layout and you may find that you need to play around with your settings for the best results. I do totally suggest you settle the format or your URL’s immediately and before you import a lot of content that will be indexed by search engines. Although you can use the URL redirect to create new alias and 301 redirects it makes little sense to cause any type of change in the content format or any chances for confusion on resource location. The quickest and easiest way to end up in the Google Sandbox is to have too much duplicate content when you get started.

What theme your site uses makes a difference and you’ll want to make sure it makes proper use of H1, H2 and H3 tags. Be sure to include at least one header tag on every page by surrounding the title in H1 and if possible try using H3 or H4 around descriptive keywords or content teasers. Of courser site navigation and proper breadcrumb help end users move around your content as they do the same for search engines so make sure to check out the Custom Breadcrumbs Module for better layout and drill down SEO for your Drupal website.

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Software Review: My first experience with Drupal has been amazing is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

I have been a WordPress user for about 5 years I think. I have watched it mature into one of the finest web development platforms and the fact it is an open source application is what makes it all the more powerful and versatile. I would have said that it was the finest until very recently when I took the time to build out a community website using Drupal open source CMS but the sheer scale and power of Drupal are hard to beat when you consider WordPress is a bloggers solution primarily geared to one type of content production and limited in the way of group usage. Building a Community site is somewhat limited with WordPress because of the weak support at the core for discussion forums and community style features like file sharing and communication.

Where WordPress is built for just one user the real strength in Drupal comes in the integration of such a variety of content production and user management features. Wayy back in 2006 I built a community website using WordPress blog as the foundation and I added a SimpleMachines forum and CopperMine gallery to make a single login site but the linkage was unstable at best and the entire site became a resource hog because of the mish mash of scripts it took to make it happen. Drupal offers a very raw and basic suite of easy to mange tools plus a robust and diverse community of followers building out modules and add ons that allow you to build our a better framework for large scale community websites. The core features of integrated blogs, forums, comments and contact information make for a superior application for community website development albeit with a stronger learning curve and more ground work than a one click WordPress site.

Drupal is raw and you have to basically build a site from scratch with lots of time spent on setting up everything from content types and url paths to taxonomy, site navigation, user role types and permissions and just about everything else you can imagine. The core documentation and online forums are great but form someone to just dive into the application with no experience and build a website from it has got to be 100 times more difficult. As an experienced developer I was still a bit confused with all that it does and things like content types and taxonomy hierarchy were a trick to manage even for an old pro. I’m still not sure i completely understand the difference between a Story, a Page or a Book but I was able to find a use for each in two separate websites and when you turn everything on and tweak it to work for you it can be an awesome piece of free software.

Drupal is rich and diverse and a definite all in one tool for web developers but the all in one wonders always have one weak spot and that is the fact that while it may do everything it’s not very good at any one thing. Each of the core features including blogs and forums specifically are almost unusable in the fresh install state and require the use of modules to enhance the user experience and even gain what seem like standard features. As an example the blog tools in Drupal are by far the weakest and you have to add everything from decent WYSIWYG editors to file upload, media capabilities and much more before you come up with anything close to a WordPress blog tool. Exactly the same can be said for the forums capability which seems stuck in as an afterthought at this point. The forums are weak still with the use of even the best available modules but when you look at the site as a whole I think the individual misses get washed over in the coolness of it all. I have a total of about 100 hours building out two community sites that I am mildly impressed with both even in their infancy and I can see that they will turn out to be good strong sites so long as my marketing efforts pan out.

It has not been smooth sailing the whole way and I was forced to complete scrap my first runs of the site because I made a mess of the database one each site trying all the different modules and plugin libraries require. I had issues with file permissions, version incompatibility and a boat load of other issues but I have been able to learn from my mistake and take baby steps when changing things and now I feel I’m capable of building out anything I ever needed for a website with Drupal. The thing is you have to use all the features and functions and shoot for a big site in order to compensate for the short coming if each feature. Big sites are what I am building for now and Drupal is my new software of choice for awhile. I’ll be doing more articles on how I use it and my must have Drupal modules as we progress in the sites and I’ll keep updates on how things go.

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Firefox on Ubuntu is awesome is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

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Making the transition to Ubuntu and dropping Windows forever is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

I have been using the Windows Operating System since Windows 95 was introduced to the market and never really used another OS until Ubuntu which I installed from a LiveCD onto a laptop and played with for the first time in about 2007 I think it was. I was impressed with what I saw and was very hopeful that it would mature into a replacement for Windows which, although incredibly powerful, always seemed limited in many ways.

The security issues and constant attacks on Windows systems plus a few nasty Windows virus infections has made me want a new operating system for a very long time but my intense usage of so many Windows specific programs made it a seemingly impossible task. Now I realize I may have been facing an AOL style issue or portal syndrome as it may be called. What is portal syndrome you ask? Remember the old AOL portal and how limited it’s interaction with the real Internet was? With AOL you rarely had raw Internet access and most if not all of the content you saw was provided by the AOL portal. It presented a very distorted view of the Internet and what was actually available out there.

I think being on a Windows platform and assuming you can’t do that with Linux or other open source applications is the same portal syndrome. Unless you start using Ubuntu or some other Linux flavor you are unaware of just how powerful and superior Unix is over Windows operating system. Ubuntu is so much easier to use. It is far more intuitive, responsive and simplistic to use even for a novice user. The Ubuntu Software Center is a step above the old Synaptics Package manager which is still present and adding new software or tweaks to your Ubuntu operating system is a much easier process with full integration directly in the OS which is so much easier and better than the discombobulated and dysfunctional Windows updates, patches and software delivery process.

Installing Ubuntu on my laptop was simple and straightforward and everything seems to function just fine with just a few tweaks of the Nvidia drivers using the Restricted Hardware Drivers service built into Ubuntu so I can get full usage of my graphics card including 3D support.The integrated software installation and ease of updating Ubuntu has made my decision to make a full transition to Ubuntu an easier choice. I will still have access to Windows systems including the new laptop we have with Windows 7 on it plus I’ll still use my experience on the Windows platform including my Microsoft certifications for clients business when necessary but personally I will stop using proprietary software including Windows and any other applications whenever possible.

Obviously there are limitations to this with Flash being a perfect example of the type of proprietary software i will have to use but I will no longer buy and pay for software such as Microsoft Office or Windows or any other program which has an open source solution. I’m not against software vendors and developers making a living from software but I am or against paying for something that is available for free and I think open software development is good for everyone not just the developers. The open and free sharing of ideas and information leads to new ideas and information and with a world full of developers working together we are bound to find more solutions.

There are some things I will miss right away like the Vista Speech tools and maybe some marketing specific tools like link builders and submitters I have used in the past but I’ll have so many new things to work with that I think I’ll find myself doing more than I have been recently. Ubuntu has a number of features that can be easily added including great tools for Ham Radio, Satellite Tracking and Media Broadcasting like that are beyond existing for me. I’m very interested in turning this laptop and a satellite receiver I have here into a global communications device capable of two way information exchange from anywhere on the planet.

in the process of installing Ubuntu on the laptop I corrupted the MBR of my Windows Vista installation and I can only boot into Ubuntu for now. It’s probably an easy fix but I think I’ll leave it jacked for now so I’m forced into using Ubuntu even when it might be easier for me just to revert back to Windows for some task I’m more familiar with on that platform. I’m going to start blogging more about open source applications and Windowless solutions to my transition. the first big change will come when I chose a new photo management tool over Google Picasa which I am going to replace for no other reason than I want to see what is available to me in Ubuntu. I have a date with F-Spot Photo Manager and Fotowall this afternoon as I pool my media collection and prepare to post some more content online.

I have a few gigabytes of video to upload and and a brand new 9MB digital cable connection with a blazing fast 758K upload speed that I’m just dying to take for a test ride

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Google bans employees from using Windows is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

Google has taken an extreme step by banning employees from using Microsoft Windows OS. This may seem small but if you ask me it’s absolutely huge. That Google would take the extreme measures of actually banning the world most popular operating systems must be seen as a sign of bad things in the future for Microsoft.

With the availability of alternative operating systems such as Linux and even Chrome we are certain to see an ever increasing number of major players making the switch to safer more secure platforms. Microsoft has recently announced a major shakeup in their Entertainment and Devices Division with Robbie back and crew soon to be filing for unemployment benefits because of the massive failure of the Zune and Kin devices.

Who do you think will be the next major tech company to ban the use of Windows Operating System? Will anyone care if Windows just died?

LONDON (Reuters) – Web search group Google Inc is phasing out internal use of rival Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system because of security concerns following a Chinese hacking incident, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday.

Citing several Google employees, the FT said the decision to move to other operating systems including Apple Inc’s Mac OS and open-source Linux began in earnest in January after Google’s Chinese operations were hacked.

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Glass sinks for the bathroom is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

So we’re buying a new home as you all know and I have some decisions to make on the remodeling job we are doing. The new house is in need of some minor repairs and a fresh coat of paint but we are taking the opportunity to spice things up some and we are looking for some unique ideas to make this a more personalized home for the family. It’s been 4 years since we actualy owned our own home and we were traveling overseas for 2 of those so the kids have not had a permanent place to call home for some time.

We got to looking for things to do in the kids bathroom and it made us realize we need to remodel both bathrooms because we are unhappy with the ugly sinks and fixtures. We saw some glass sinks used in a home on one of those tv design shows the wife loves and we thought that a glass sink in the boys bathroom would be a cool way to kick off some color and style in the new home. The kids bathroom is small and a glass sink would work best on a pedestal so we can cut down on the clutter and provide some open space for the boys to move around in.

After reading up on glass sinks I came to realize that there was a hygienic reason for having glass sinks as well and I am now going to replace the sinks in our bathroom as well because I want a glass too.

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Google Docs Overhauled, Microsoft Should Be Worried | Up Front | Fast Company is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

Google Docs Overhauled, Microsoft Should Be Worried | Up Front | Fast Company: “Google Docs, the convenient online-competitor to Microsoft Office, today rolled out some great new features that combine many of the search-giants services into one handy product. The key to the overhaul is real-time collaboration. Essentially, it combines features from Buzz and Google chat to create a document-style layout, with an in-the-margins sidebar that allows you to track changes, add comments, and talk with co-workers as you would in Gchat. More importantly, the editing is done entirely real-time, enabling users to see feedback instantaneously, or ‘character-by-character’ as Google refers to i”

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