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When something’s wrong with your Web site, you want it fixed ASAP. But did you know that the way you report a bug to your developer(s) could actually slow things down and ultimately waste your organization’s money?

Check out The Four Types of Email Programmers Receive and see if you’ve ever sent a message like that. (Don’t worry, we all have at one point — but now you know better, right? ;)

Still not sure if building your Web site with Drupal is the right choice?  Consider this: Drupal won the Hall of Fame Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards.  Drupal had previously won the 2007 and 2008 Best Overall Open Source CMS Award.

I’m a little late in posting this (ok, a lot late), but the thousands of people who contribute to Drupal in so many ways all have my respect, congratulations, and support.

How do you build a modern news Web site that gives editors the tools they needs to serve San Francisco with in-depth reporting on important local issues — all without spending millions of dollars? You use Drupal.

That’s exactly what the nonprofit news organization SF Public Press did when it built SFPublicPress.org.

Although the startup focuses on the stories that other news organizations aren’t covering, it still has to compete for the attention of today’s tech-savvy readers who have many options for receiving news.

To do that, SFPublicPress.org offers much more than news articles on the Web. Among other things, the site features:

• audio and video to help convey what text can’t;
• an interactive media gallery that gives readers new ways to dive into stories;
• easily-accessible bio pages for reporters and editors so it’s clear who is behind each story;
• RSS feeds to keep readers informed as soon as news hits the site.

With all these features and more, it’s hard to believe that building the site took fewer than 60 development hours. (It’s hard to believe even for me — and I built it!)  But that’s the power of the Drupal content management system, and that’s why I recommend it as the platform for many of my clients’ sites.

How We Did It

Analysis: When SF Public Press was formed in 2008, originally as The Public Press, the staff launched a blog-style Web site on Drupal 5. By the time I met with them in Spring 2009, they had expanded their coverage and were ready to move away from the blog format.  They also wanted to add multimedia features so they could tell stories with more than just text. Read more »

Big news: The US government has relaunched Whitehouse.gov, its flagshipship Web site, on the Drupal content management system! This is a testament to Drupal’s stability, low-cost of ownership, and community-oriented DNA.

To read more, see Drupal founder Dries Buytaert’s post on the subject:
http://buytaert.net/whitehouse-gov-using-drupal

And see also the writeup at techPresident.com:
http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/whitehousegov-goes-drupal

And I thought I was putting old technology to good use by setting up my third-generation iPod as a whitenoise machine…. This guy has me beat:

I mistyped the name of a Web site I wanted to visit today and found myself staring at a custom Comcast error page laden with advertising instead of the usual Firefox “site not found” page.  That’s right, Comcast has started hijacking its customers’ spelling errors and using them to make an extra buck off advertising.

If you’re a Comcast Internet customer and you try to visit a Web site that doesn’t exist, you’re likely to get sent to a page like the following:

Want to opt out?  Comcast makes you dig up your modem’s MAC address and submit that along with your email address.  I’m off to go look at my modem.

This video from Scofield Editorial about vendor-client relationships made me laugh.  Consultants will get a kick out of it.

(Oh, dear clients, don’t worry. The video isn’t about you — it’s about other people’s clients. You’re the best, of course! ;-)

One more than one occasion recently, I’ve found myself trying to explain to friends and clients what features the Drupal content management system provides “out of the box.”  As I quickly realized, it’s not easy to do because Drupal is so rarely used as-is out of the box. It’s a “platform” on which you build the Web site you want, not a Web site in itself and certainly not a strictly defined tool that only does one thing.

But telling an entrepreneur they should adopt an amorphous “platform” that they’ll have to “build on” before they have a working Web site is admittedly unconvincing.  And it doesn’t do Drupal justice.

Unfortunately, Drupal’s own documentation on features doesn’t focus as much as I’d like on the features entrepreneurs are most likely to be interested in.  So then, here’s my take on what Drupal provides out of the box — and, by extension, what makes Drupal so great for Web development:

Read more »

With more than a decade of unbiased reviews of digital cameras under its belt, the Digital Camera Resource Page decided it was time to ugrade the underlying technology used to serve the reviews and move them to a multi-page format.  The new format helps split the in-depth reviews into more manageable chunks for the reader and provides additional ad inventory for the publisher.  Plus, the new content management system decreases the time it takes to publish a review and gallery.

The system was built on Drupal, which will make future expansion a snap. It uses multiple layers of caching to limit the load on the server and ensure users continue to get the fast page loads they’re used to.  It fits into the existing site architecture, some of which doesn’t use Drupal.  And it was deployed onto the active site with only minutes of total downtime.

Ensuring that old URLs continued to work was a challenge, but not insurmountable. Most of the system was built using contributed Drupal modules.  The majority of the custom code that was written was for the theme.  All in all, this is a great example of Drupal’s content management capabilities on a high traffic site.

(PS: If you need a digital camera, the Digital Camera Resource Page is the first place you should look!)

What started out as a solo quest to help a client fix a nasty problem has turned into a collaboration with several open source Drupal developers as we test, debug, and put together documentation for a nascent module.  It’s exciting. More later. I should be sleeping and there’s lots of work to do. But isn’t it great when you can say your work is fun?  This beats office politics, turf wars, and endless meetings any day.