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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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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Bridge your WordPress Blog with a Simple Machines Forum is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

I have a few websites built using WordPress as my CMS but there is one feature WordPress is lacking and that’s a decent forum for robust discussion on topics with features like file sharing and all the other wonderful toys bulletin boards have to offer. BBpress.org is weak at best and not even compliant with the latest version of WordPress.

I have been using Simple Machines Forum for my message boards for over 2 years now and it’s a wicked piece of software you can download for free and build a great website with. I love the admin features you find in SMF and I really like the packages feature that allows you to so easily add on features and even updates. Downloading new packages and adding a new feature to your forum has never been easier and the online template mods make site changes fast and easy. The ease of use and numerous features has allowed me to make some heavy modifications to my default forum installations.

One of my favorite mods is to combine my two favorite site building software applications using some modified software bridges to join them. The first is a WordPress plugin that merges the WordPress login and creates a new forum member for each blog user who to join. The combined accounts allow one login to post comments on the blog and topics in the forum. This plugin is the one I use to bridge my WordPress blog users and SMF forum members but its modified using some tips I got here in the SMF forums and it only works by using the SMF_WordPress package installed in your forum that you can download here.

This setup allows my members to use both sections of the site with one login but they do still have two profile pages. The bridge links select fields from the WordPress users page with the SMF members profile. The SMF profile has more options but with a little custom coding you can add these to your WordPress blog and create a very customized look.

This worked fine for me until I came to realize that what I really wanted was for each new blog post to have a forum topic for discussion of each article and to handle comments from the blog. I found a plugin for wordpress that does just that and now I am hoping to have it customized to do even more. The SMF Commenter takes each new post from your blog and creates a new topic for your forum so long as they are installed in the same local database. It creates a link back between the post and the topic and helps move traffic from both sides of the site. I’m hoping to show the discussion of each topic on the blog home page with some future modifications but for now I have to settle for a simple link between the two.

It is however really nice to have the automatic topic creation for each new post. This only works on posts made from within WordPress Admin. If I make a post using something like Performancing for Firefox then I have to save it as a draft and then manually post from within WordPress to get the plugin to create the topic but that’s good enough for the sites I have that need this.

If you have any other ideas on integrating WordPress and Simple Machines please make a comment and let me know.

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Keeping up with link building is important is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

I lost some PR rank on the last two Google updates and my best sites are suffering because of it. It’s my own fault also because I knew what I was doing was not good. Around the beginning of this year I came to realize that links were tainted. What I mean was there was so much hype on links and link building that i thought to myself Google must be downgrading the importance of links by now. There are simply to many spammy link building methods and in the end they’ll catch on to things like link exchanges, trackback spamming and blog commenting. I gave up on link building and focused instead on content development.

I built an army of blogs and added as much fresh and unique content as I could produce. For the past year I spent 4 times more on content development than I did on link building and I think it has cost me. I think content is still important but I think my PR drop is directly related to the facgt I gave up on link building for months now. I have changed things up and focused on link building to my better blogs while maintaining the same level of content production so I can keep my readers satisfied while boosting readership with new inbound links.

The lesson here is to maintain a balance of link building and content development so I can keep my ranking while building a bigger and better site.

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My Lifestream is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

Lifestream is a wordpress plugin which allows me to link all of my social networks and the activity in each account to my blog with a page to display a summary of my actions. My Lifestream is published here and contains my Facebook, MySpace, del.icio.us, Mixx, Magnolia, YouTube, StumbleUpon and the many other social services I now have. Just listig them all has reminded me that i need to update a few of my profiles with the latest information.

Whats the reason for this? Well I’m interested in using this blog as an announcement platform for a social marketing service I want to build and I am linking this blog up to all of my social networks. I am hoping to develop a port of this blog to be used for music promotion and band management. I have a number of artists who have asked me to develop an online promotion tool and this is part of that. So look for more blog posts each day with an update of my social network activity. This may be a big part of my blogging on this site for awhile. Enjoy!

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Maintaining a posting schedule for my blogs is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

I’m not very good at schedules and I have been neglecting some of my better performing blogs because I don’t have time to write. A lot of my time has been spent on offline projects and my online time recently has been buying and selling domains. I’m going to write more on that soon.

My blog posting has been sporadic and even non existent on a number of my blogs. I had most of my sites up and running on a normal posting schedule but my personal life was suffering. I was writing many of my posts live and not taking advantage of the scheduling features available in WordPress.

If I had taken better care to plan out my writing I could have made the articles I already wrote last a bit longer and made a more consistent posting pattern. I don;t know if it matters but I would think its better to be regular with the blog posting and content updates. Blogs are supposed to be the latest and greatest or fresh news so why let your blog go stale?

I’m going to write a bunch of articles and then post them out at least a couple weeks in advance so we can try to keep up with the content delivery you have come to expect from us.

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Google News Alerts for content updates is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

I’ve been using Google News alerts for years now and I guess alot of people should know about them but it occurred to me that I should drop a short post on how cool it is to News Alerts for all sorts of things. You can set an alert for any keyword you want and use the email updates for article ideas like I do for each topic I cover in my blog network.

I use the alerts on sites related to Zune and other gadgets, Jamaica and Negril specifically as well as to search for things like my own name, my company name and the name of some other companies that I track. I use an alert to notify me of new links found to a number of my sites and I also use them to track some of my favorite topics such as search marketing, blogging and george bush.

I also use my iGoogle homepage to track some of my favorite subject and the numerous RSS feeds I read for article ideas. It’s helps me organize my favorite content and post articles faster when I’m ready to write.

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No more parked domains is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

I’m tired of having some domains that have been parked for over 2 years now as I was never able to get them all developed and now I want to go back and build out the rest of my domain portfolio. I need to hire a web savvy person locally to train to manage some of this work load for me because with over 500 domains and 350+ sites to manage I’m overwhelmed already.

I have been partial to building blogs lately and I guess I’ll probably keep doing the same thing with lots of new blogs for my keyword targeted domains. I’ll need some content writers to spin up some new articles for these blogs because I can’t write much more than I am already. I think I’m burned out and I have found many of my articles are starting to sound the same.

Anyone want to write a few thousand articles for me?

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Geo targeting keywords with online directories is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

I’ve had a few directories online for quite some time now and I have always appreciated the geo specific capabilities of a directory. Recently I was approached to assist in marketing a large scale project and targeting a range of geo based keywords was a goal. IN order to achieve our best success I suggested we build an industry directory using my favorite directory script WSN links.

Since building the directory is so darn easy I actually bought a domain and put the site up as a demo to the client as an example of what I could do with a new site as opposed to trying to reinvent an old one. The idea proved so popular they bought the domain and the site and I am now responsible for promoting it and securing even better traffic than we have already seen.

Thats right the site was online for less than 2 weeks and never submitted in any location but it has already begun to naturally secure traffic on the keyword combinations I built into the directory categories. In just a few short weeks the site was already bringing in a few clicks each day for combinations such as “nj keyword” “kansas city keyword” “keywords in miami” and so forth. The primary corporate site is based in Georgia but the company provides an internationally viable service. Building a directory on the corporate domain was not the right idea for liability reasons and by having the new site driving traffic to the corporate site we actually now end up with more than one chance in the top ten.

If you’re trying to target geo specific keyword combinations consider a niche directory and the right categories for your next project.

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