Content | Utopian Web Strategy

WordPress can make easy to use Content Management System

WordPress can make easy to use Content Management System

In today’s world though WordPress is better known as blogging software program, still it is being used for other things aside from regular blogging purpose due to its versatility. Most of us know that WordPress is open source software with the strong support from a community of developers; WordPress can be used as CMS-Content Management System. Even if there are many CMS options available, there are lots of advantages which make WordPress a wise choice for personal or business use which is the main reason for its popularity.

One of the best advantage of WordPress is it is almost free. With the little knowledge and with know-how attitude, anyone can create a website at a minimal cost. Installation of WordPress itself is free and few add-ons are usually quite easy on the pocket. This makes WordPress an ideal option for small business that prefers to work with low funding budget for website development. In connection, most of the time it is very economical to tweak website later on.

While using WordPress, both beginners and expert users discovers that with the use of massive library of plug-ins available, they can create a functional website with all the features they want without much extensive coding. As this software has a built-in WYSIWYG-What You See Is What You Get editor, writing becomes breeze. It is advisable for those who plan to create a website that they see that aside from being convenient, it is consuming less time to make and it is user-friendly also.

Developing a website is not just enough nowadays. It is important to establish strong web presence, something that WordPress is good at. Your website is more optimized and easier to index in search engines with the application of a few features. Website will be able to sufficiently promote itself without the need to invest a lot of time in online marketing. Since nothing is constant when it comes to page ranks, users are happy to note that in a little time they can easily modify something to suit the current market trends.

Definitely WordPress as CMS has changed not just businesses but the facade of the Internet itself. With the use of WordPress a lot of people are capable of producing well-made website without pouring too many resources on the project. It is less frustrating to produce a website that would fully answer your needs, cyberspace becoming friendlier for everyone.

Aug 23rd, 10 | WordPress | Comments (0)

Content Management System Using Drupal

The main attraction of the Drupal Content Management System is its versatility. You can perform the most elementary task of a two page site to a social network with voluminous traffic. It is an open source content management system. Along with this great flexibility, you get an advanced set up and configuration. The site will take a bit longer to be ready, but the wait is worth in the long run. Drupal is written in PHP language and requires a MySQL database. You are able to build various types of web pages and blogs and any type of online communications.

Important features:

Collaborative content creation: It has features to create a book for collaborative content creation. A book has many numbered pages in serial order. Similar is the case with the computer book. It has sections, chapters, subsections, bibliography and so forth. Such books can be used as a manual or a resource guide to give answers to questions and queries. The advantage for the users is that it can write content, reviews, edit and add to the pages. You can work alone or as a part of the group.

This advanced system has links to next or previous pages. You are able to set up a menu. Move around in the book through a navigation block. See the menu first and browse the pages as per your requirements. Through the menu page, you are able to add links to your other books. At the bottom of the page you find the print links to obtain the result of printer friendly display of the pages.

Modules:

Build, enhance and extend the core functionality of Drupal development through modules. They are plug-in devices. Modules are contributed by the website community. You have varied modules, such as e-commerce, evaluation or rating, commerce, advertising, file management, filters or editors and so forth.

Online Help:

Drupal renders online help to the Drupal development community. Some of them are slides, videos, tutorials and how-to, self-help articles. The guide pages include essential topics like updating modules, themes and take care of other projects.

Open Source:

Drupal is open source in the real sense of the term. As per the terms of the GNU (General Pubic License) majority of the software are by nature restrictive, and the user is not given the freedom to modify it. You can not share it either. Under this type of license, you have total freedom even to change the software. You can distribute the copies free of charge or even make a commercial sale of the same. You can change the software and use it in parts along with any software program. What more customization environment a user may require? The individual preferences are given due regard as you can personalize both its content and presentation.

Users and access and management settings:

The exercise of real freedom is provided in the system. No elaborate permission formats for each user are necessary. The module permits the users to register, log in or log out. The created content can be associated with it. Users use own names and set up ‘my account page.’ Cookies without personal information are provided and they are the tools to retrieve information stored in one’s server. Many other functions like Creating Polls, Templating, Threaded comments and discussions and Blogger API support are provided in Drupal.

Jun 29th, 10 | Drupal | Comments (0)

Drupal As Your Chosen Content Management System

Drupal As Your Chosen Content Management System

If Drupal isn’t the world’s most popular Content Management Systems then it certainly is in the top five - there must be hundreds of thousands of websites built using this CMS.

Drupal was started by Belgium programmer Dries Buytaert in 2001, and today the award-winning project encompasses a thriving online community and many conferences and get-togethers in cities across the globe.

There is an extremely active development community that surrounds the project, with the company Lullabot being particularly keen to roll out audio and video guides for everyday use.

Based upon the Dutch word “dorp” (village), it is an open source project released under a GNU General Public License.

For those that haven’t used the CMS yet (and as those that have will testify to), Drupal isn’t easy to master. It takes some time to get to grips with much of the basic framework, and even then hardly any Drupal site is run without the assistance of one or more third-party modules.

When it comes to learning this CMS, the online Drupal guides are notoriously sparse. This isn’t a problem that is exclusive to Drupal as most developers love writing code, but hate writing the accompanying documentation.

If you find that the information on their site is not detailed enough or difficult to navigate through then a good book to buy is Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6 by David Mercer (Packt Publishing). This book isn’t necessarily cheap, but it is easy to read and will give you a good grounding in using Drupal.

A good source of advice when tackling this CMS is at their forum. You can almost guarantee that your query would have been asked before so use their search function and check from the thousands of old threads before you start a new one.

A big problem too with using Drupal is finding the right third-party module for the job. There are over 4,000 published modules, and although some are extremely well-written by coders with years of experience, others are perhaps not so hot and code perfect.

It takes a great deal of trial and error to find the addons that you know you can depend on.

Here are some essential Drupal modules that I use in every installation:

Token: Used by a number of different modules including CKK, Custom Breadcrumbs and Pathauto.

Pathauto: This creates user and search engine friendly URLs.

Cache Exclude: It allows you to exclude certain pages when you turn on your cache. It is essential to exclude the frontpage if you have a number of different users signing in and out.

Custom Breadcrumbs: Creates pretty, workable breadcrumbs for individual pages.

Meta tags: Adds description and keywords meta tags to pages.

XML sitemap: As the title suggests, this module creates an XML sitemap.

Content management filter: Enables greater control of nodes in the administration section.

Javascript Aggregator: Minifies the aggregated JavaScript file when Optimize JavaScript is enabled.

CAPTCHA: Essential install in order to stop being overrun by spam.

PNG Behave: A great module if you are using 24 or 32 bit PNG image files and would like them to render properly in IE6.

Views / CKK / Panels / Contemplate: These are all essential modules if you really want to get to grips with Drupal as they allow you to make drastic modifications to Drupal core and themes without knowledge of PHP

Jun 27th, 10 | Drupal | Comments (0)

Using Drupal Content Management System

Using Drupal Content Management System: Open Source Drupal CMS

Using Drupal is easy if you have a video tutorial from which to learn. Drupal is an open source CMS (content management system), which can be sued to create websites, blogs, social networking sites and so on. In fact there is virtually no limit to what you can be using Drupal for, and it’s free.

What that means is that the source code is free to anybody that wants to use Drupal, although you can purchase various forms of customization, including themes and modules to offer specific effects and website components. Drupal is written in PHP and works with a variety of operating systems, including Windows, Linux, MAC and others, and a database system such as MySQL can be used for data storage - in fact a database of some form is essential.

Most of the content in Drupal is made up of what are referred to as ‘nodes’. A node is intrinsically a piece of information, and they can come in a variety of content types. Among the predefined Drupal content types are ‘page’ and ’story’, although you can also define your own. There is virtually no limit to the type of website you can develop using Drupal, but it can be heavy on use of resources.

For that reason you are advised to use a Virtual private server (VPS) or a dedicated server if you intend using Drupal to develop a large website such as a community or social networking site. If you are simply developing a small website for yourself, then you should manage with shared hosting, but otherwise you are best to get a dedicated hosting account.

Although learning Drupal is not difficult, you should learn the right way. By far the best way is to have private tuition, but that can be far too pricy for most people. You can also just play about with it, and pick it up as you go. However, if you are serious about using a Drupal content management system, then a Drupal video course is likely the best solution.

Drupal core is the standard installation of Drupal that contains a taxonomy system that enables content to be tagged with keywords, so that it is easily accessed. It includes a number of modules that enables the functionality of the system to be customized. Among the standard modules in the core download are search functions, a multi-level menu system, access statistics and logging, comments, polls and forums, RSS feed and aggregator and many more.

There are also several core Drupal themes, that allow the look and feel of the sites to be customized, and also supports a large number of languages.

If all this sounds complex, it is not as difficult to learn as you might think. A Drupal video tutorial is probably the best way of learning to use Drupal, since you can watch and copy, and replay any part that needs special attention. Using the Drupal open source CMS enables you to put your ideas for unique websites into practice, and also to immeasurably improve the functionality of the blogs, forums and social websites that you will learn to design.

Jun 24th, 10 | Drupal | Comments (0)

A Powerful Open Source Content Management System - Drupal

A Powerful Open Source Content Management System - Drupal

Drupal has a powerful open source content management system that allows you to classify and tag content. Drupal category can be limited to certain content types. For example, you could have blog contents that allowed free tagging (similar to WordPress categories), while your news section might have a different vocabulary (set of categories) that could only be selected from an existing list of categories. You can also have hierarchical categories, with single or multiple parent categories. Drupal’s advanced taxonomy features, allow you to easily target all of those long-tail keywords that you researched in Wordtracker.

You can views Modules to create new content types and create advanced custom views for them without writing any code. A few examples of “content types” are “blog posts”, “news stories”, “forum posts”, “tutorials”, “classified ads”, “podcasts”. You can create as many custom content types as you would like and display them in many different ways. Most content management systems would require writing code to accomplish these tasks, but there is no programming knowledge required to do them in Drupal.

Drupal was designed for community-based Web sites and has strong user role and access manage functionality. You can create as many custom user roles with custom access levels as you require. For example you could create the following roles, each with different levels of access to your features: “anonymous visitor”, “genuine user”, “editor”, “webmaster”, “admin”. You can keep the advanced user management features (like multiple blogs) turned off if you don’t want them, enabling them later if your site grows to a point where you would like to add more community features.

Large and Friendly Community - With so many major sites using Drupal, it’s not going away soon. For an idea of the size of the developer community, take a look at the long list of community-contributed modules.

Jun 23rd, 10 | Drupal | Comments (0)

Using Drupal Content Management System: Open Source Drupal CMS

Using Drupal Content Management System: Open Source Drupal CMS

Using Drupal is easy if you have a video tutorial from which to learn. Drupal is an open source CMS (content management system), which can be sued to create websites, blogs, social networking sites and so on. In fact, there is virtually no limit to what you can be using Drupal for, and it’s free.

What that means is that the source code is free to anybody that wants to use Drupal, although you can purchase various forms of customization, including themes and modules to offer specific effects and website components. Drupal is written in PHP and works with a variety of operating systems, including Windows, Linux, MAC and others, and a database system such as MySQL can be used for data storage - in fact a database of some form is essential.

Most of the content in Drupal is made up of what are referred to as ‘nodes’. A node is intrinsically a piece of information, and they can come in a variety of content types. Among the predefined Drupal content types are ‘page’ and ’story’, although you can also define your own. There is virtually no limit to the type of website you can develop using Drupal, but it can be heavy on use of resources.

For that reason, you are advised to use a Virtual private server (VPS) or a dedicated server if you intend using Drupal to develop a large website such as a community or social networking site. If you are simply developing a small website for yourself, then you should manage with shared hosting, but otherwise you are best to get a dedicated hosting account.

Although learning Drupal is not difficult, you should learn the right way. By far the best way is to have private tuition, but that can be far too pricy for most people. You can also just play about with it, and pick it up as you go. However, if you are serious about using a Drupal content management system, then a Drupal video course is likely the best solution.

Drupal core is the standard installation of Drupal that contains a taxonomy system that enables content to be tagged with keywords, so that it is easily accessed. It includes a number of modules that enables the functionality of the system to be customized. Among the standard modules in the core download are search functions, a multi-level menu system, access statistics and logging, comments, polls and forums, RSS feed and aggregator and many more.

There are also several core Drupal themes that allow the look and feel of the sites to be customized, and also supports a large number of languages.

If all this sounds complex, it is not as difficult to learn as you might think. A Drupal video tutorial is probably the best way of learning to use Drupal, since you can watch and copy, and replay any part that needs special attention. Using the Drupal open source CMS enables you to put your ideas for unique websites into practice, and also to immeasurably improve the functionality of the blogs, forums and social websites that you will learn to design.

Jun 19th, 10 | Drupal | Comments (0)

Getting the Best From Drupal Content Management Systems

Getting the Best From Drupal Content Management Systems

Drupal is one of the most popular content management systems used across the web. It seems the popularity of the Drupal content management system grows by the day, too. And while the CMS is known for its user-friendliness and its ability to be used by even the non-tech set, to get the most out of Drupal you may need to seek the help of outsiders.
About The Drupal CMS

If you’ve been on the web and looked into building and maintaining a website, there is a strong likelihood that you have at least heard the name Drupal. There is an equally strong likelihood that the Drupal CMS has been recommended to you in one instance or another as the best and most affordable platform for your website.

The reasoning for the popularity of the Drupal content management system is strong. Drupal is free, highly functional, and highly customizable. Once you’ve built a Drupal customized CMS, you will have created a very navigable, very functional, and very attractive and visitor-friendly website.And with the flexibility of the add-ons and modules, you can build that Drupal customized CMS to include almost any page or platform, from blogs and wikis to static content pages, forums, and ecommerce and shopping sites.

In addition, the Drupal content management system is free. The core program is an open source framework. Anyone can go to Drupal.org and download the most current version and add-ons, so there is no cost to obtain the basic software. However, to get the most from the Drupal CMS you’ll probably need some extra help.

Help From Drupal Experts

Drupal is an ongoing web community project. That is, the core program has been built, expanded, and improved thanks to the volunteer efforts of thousands of users. This is precisely what has given Drupal content management systems their high functionality and real-world usability. All of the best that Drupal experts have built are offered through the core frameworks, and even more are offered through forums and other media.

Experienced programmers and site builders enjoy the independence that Drupal CMS offers for basically no money. But many website owners do not have the technical knowledge to feel confident using Drupal on their own to build their own websites or to maintain one; even though do-it-yourself Drupal users tout the ease of the system and the ability for anyone (even those without programming knowledge) to utilize it, many of the less technically-oriented feel overwhelmed by the task of installing and customizing the program to build their own website. To be sure, many who have tried did become overwhelmed and found the need to seek outside help.

Although Drupal was designed as a free application, it is still possible to get expert help and hire experienced Drupal web designers to handle the daunting task of website building and maintenance. Drupal experts offer their services while using the core program and appropriate modules. This gives those who have neither the time nor expertise to use the program on their own the same capabilities of the tech-savvy design crowd, while delivering a still more affordable option in high-functioning website design.

The Drupal content management system offers a world of opportunities and solutions in website design. With the added assistance of Drupal experts and Drupal web designers, any person or business, large or small, can build their website with one of the best and most functional framework applications available to website owners today.

| Drupal | Comments (0)

Drupal - A Powerful Content Management System

Drupal - Rich Content Management System (cms)

Drupal is a feature rich Content Management System (CMS) which allows webmasters to run dynamic web site without PHP knowledge. The Drupal content management system is a popular free framework for building and maintaining web sites with high functionality. Drupal CMS was written in PHP and can be downloaded free of charge.

You are a very skilled programmer, or have lots of time to learn the ins and outs of this program and all its customized features, you will quite probably want to looking into hire Drupal developer to handle your website’s development.

How any non-programmer can use Drupal for free, you might want to consider these things before you bite off more than you can chew.

· Drupal hosting issues: Drupal hosting requires more than your average hosting. Drupal sites run off PHP programming language, and require a large amount of MySQL database storage space to optimize.

· Customization and functionality: one of the best reasons to use Drupal over another framework or CMS is the ability to customize your site and functions. Drupal is quite flexible and with it you can do so much on one site

· Customizing Drupal sites: Drupal can be used to build all manner of ecommerce sites, but again there are many peripheral considerations that require more of an expert touch—many that are very serious indeed.

· Drupal ecommerce considerations: Drupal can be used to build all manner of ecommerce sites, but again there are many peripheral considerations that require more of an expert touch—many that are very serious indeed.

· Drupal support: Drupal is a user-based software framework, one built by many willing volunteer hands, there is no parent site or organization to answer to you.

Drupal has a many of the feature for witch you expect from modern CMS, just few are below:

· Sensible URLs and URL aliasing: Many CMS generate long, convoluted URLs that are difficult to share via e-mail or over the phone. Drupal arguably generates the sleekest URLs in the CMS world.

· Syndication and aggregation: Community Web sites benefit from information flowing in and out of the site. Content stored in Drupal easily can be syndicated to readers or other Web sites using RSS feeds.

· Modular architecture: Drupal’s functionality is organized into modules that can be switched on and off. This approach makes it possible to build different kinds of Web sites with Drupal.

· Developer-friendly: We anticipated the need to customize any CMS we selected. We felt comfortable with Drupal’s elegantly designed architecture and the consistency of the code. It was relatively easy to understand a feature and start making modifications.

· Taxonomy: Our single-most important reason for selecting Drupal was its powerful taxonomy system for categorizing content. It is possible to create a set of descriptive terms and associate content with those terms.

With Drupal we can use different types of projects, including corporate, collaborative, intranet and academic Web sites. It is an excellent thing to be able to harness the power of a content management system like Drupal. But if your lack of time or knowledge prohibits you from maximizing the benefit of the program, you will most certainly need the services of an expert Drupal developer.

Jun 18th, 10 | Drupal | Comments (0)

Insight and Strategy for Online Success

Posts Tagged ‘Content’