drupal

Drupal development tutorial: Modelling business workflows with Drupal, Views & Rules

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Drupal development tutorial workflow for a proposed collaborative authoring app

Using Drupal development to model corporate and business workflows is one of the pleasures of modern computing.

Drupal has incredibly powerful, abstract business workflow tools in the form of the Views and Rules modules/projects.

These combine seamlessly with a suite of powerful core modules that we will also make use of, such as Taxonomy and Roles.

Drupal SEO

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Drupal SEO. SEO How-to, tips and tricks Drupal webmasters. Photo by t-dot-s-dot

"How good is Drupal for SEO?" The answer: great Drupal SEO is easy to implement with the right SEO strategy, information and modules.

However, Drupal makes it easy to shoot yourself in the proverbial SEO foot at the same time, so you have to be careful.

[UPDATE]: For a complete analysis of how I recovered from a Google Panda penalty on my Drupal platform, using a wide range of SEO techniques, check out Step-by-step guide to my Google Panda penalty recovery.

Fundamentally, Drupal is a great SEO friendly platform. With the right information about how and where to tweak Drupal for SEO, you can have a lean, mean SEO machine that outperforms and out-competes your competitors.

Five reasons why Drupal is great for business

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Drupal is an excellent tool for a building and operating websites

Drupal is an excellent tool for building and operating a wide range of client facing websites and corporate intranet sites.

It has powerful features built into the core, and comes with a massive array of modules that extend its formidable default functionality.

[UPDATE]: For an in-depth comparison between the Drupal CMS and leading website builders, check out Popular website builders, Weebly & Wix, overtake Drupal & Joomla in Google Trends.

Use comments as traffic and SEO drivers

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Comments can drive trargeted traffic and increase engagement. Photo by eversion

Having relevant content (in the form of high quality comments) added to your webpages on a regular basis, without having to manually create it, is a great advantage over competitors who don't implement commenting features and don't turn their sites into a hive of content producing activity.

Even on a decent CMS platform like WordPress or Drupal, administering comments can be a bit of a pain. More than likely, while you're starting out, most of the comments you receive will be spammy garbage that can't be published to the site.

Honest Drupal reader benefits wildlife charity

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Baboon Matters wildlife organization benefits from honest Drupal reader

I was deeply touched by the honesty of one of my readers, Jason, when he emailed in from South Korea offering to pay the full amount for one of my books (Drupal 7), he had downloaded for free.

Take a look at his email:

"Hello David,

I have just begun working on a site in Drupal and wanted to learn how to use the system so I searched on Isohunt for resources. I downloaded your book Drupal 7 in PDF and printed it out.

How hard is Drupal to use?

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Drupal is great for startups, blogs and business websites. Photo by charlesc

Having a flexible, powerful and reliable web platform is one of the most important aspects to any new Internet based endeavor. The Internet is teeming with super easy to use online blog or website builders that can get a reasonable looking, basic site or blog up in a matter of minutes. We've certainly come a long way in the last 10 years in this regard.

However, with simplicity and ease-of-use, there is always a trade off. What you make up in simplicity you often lose in flexibility and power. A good example of this is hosted WordPress sites. WordPress is a fantastic web platform for bloggers, and the hosted version (http://www.wordpress.com) allows anyone to run their own blog without having to worry about hosting and server issues.

A guide to Drupal hosting

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It can be quite tricky to find exactly the right hosting service. It's important to find one that suits you and the requirements of your website.

There are plenty of good services out there, but unfortunately, there are even more poor ones. Separating the wheat from the chaff is something everyone has to do on their first time around.

Fortunately, there are a number of ways to increase the chances of finding the right hosting service.

improved file handling in Drupal 7

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While Drupal is, on aggregate, one of the best web platforms around, there's always room for improvement.

Drupal 6 has one fairly important failing when it comes to files and file handling. During site configuration you are required to decide whether or not files are downloadable directly by the public or whether Drupal should maintain control of the downloads.

This is/was a fairly inflexible system and one that led to further problems down the line...

Drupal tutorial: Embedding a view

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At some stage almost everyone running a website based on Drupal will find that they want to add a view somewhere on the site where it can't easily be done.

Most often, views can be added to blocks to accompany content types or pages and the block visibility rules can be used to tweak who gets to see the view and when.

Views can easily be added to panel pages, and most have their own dedicated page anyway. Despite all this, you might still need to know how to add a view manually...

Image handling in Drupal

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Being able to accurately control the size and dimensions of images is vital for any modern website.

Nowdays, different media types are commonplace because broadband has become ubiquitous. Because of this, websites have the opportunity to show off far superior and more interesting pages to the average visitor.

But being able to handle images on the fly is not something that is necessarily too easy to do - unless you have a well designed web platform.