"Now that Friend Connect is integrated with these popular open source CMS platforms, site owners can make registration easier for users and offer them a set of social features — all without writing a single line of code," says Globant’s Mauro Gonzalez on Google’s Social Web Blog. "Even site owners without programming experience can add these plugins."

The Google Friend Connect integrations with Drupal and Joomla include features like: 

- Interest Polls
- AdSense
- Newsletter Subscriptions
- Featured Content
- Gadgets (like Members, Comments, Recommendations, Activities, Reviews and the Social Bar)

"When a user joins a Friend Connect site, an account is created and automatically associated with his or her external account of choice (Google, Yahoo, or Twitter, for example)," explains Gonzalez. "The social gadgets can be placed anywhere in the site using the standard Drupal and Joomla administration interfaces. Site owners can moderate reviews and comments, create new polls to collect information about community members, and then advertise on the site using that information. The newsletter feature allows site owners to create and manage their newsletters using Friend Connect’s interface, and site members can subscribe and unsubscribe as desired using the newsletter gadget."

There are demos of both the Drupal and Joomla Google Friend Connect integrations set up here and here respectively. Some are hoping Google will continue to provide integrations for other content management systems, and it is probably not too much of a stretch to assume they will do so in the future.

Related Articles:

> Twitter Users a Click Away From Google Friend Connect

> Google Aims to Put the "Friend" in Friend Connect

> Google Connects Friends on WordPress Blogs

We are changing a farily large HTML site to CMS. What are the essentials to keep in mind so that we do not lose our search rankings?

Essentially the answer to the question is that you should test the waters before going all out with the entire site. When you’re changing a lot of elements on your site, it can affect rankings, but more than likely, you will be fine.

The biggest piece of advice that Cutts offers is, "Try not to launch all of this at once."

"For example, if your CMS means that your layout has to change, you can mock that up," he continues. "You can try to make it so you change your HTML so that it looks like it would look like from your content management system. And then make sure that your rankings don’t change. They shouldn’t change very much at all, but you know, if you change a whole bunch of stuff on your page, that can affect how Google scores it."

Cutts suggests changing one directory at first to sort of "dip your foot into the water." It’s a good idea to do a mock-up first and then:

- Do some A/B Testing
- Gauge users’ reactions
- See how it affects search engine rankings

You can try changing one directory at first almost like "dipping your foot in the water." Basically, you don’t want to spend a whole lot of time redesigning your site and changing it over to a new CMS, only to find that it kills your rankings. Test the waters, then if looks good, go for it.

This week Aaron Wall put his weight behind predicting that in 2-3 years time Drupal will be the CMS of choice.

What Drupal has going for it over other platforms is the sheer flexibility to integrate most bells and whistles of publishing, yet also focus on community integration and engagement.

A chance visit to another site showed me the power of Drupal – check this out: Lime.com

It is not only set up as a feature-packed online magazine, but also features community involvement.

The site features:

1. Today’s Most popular
2. Featured Members
3. Latest forum posts
4. Tag list
5. Blogs
6. News
7. Polls

It has everything a CMS should have, and more.

More importantly, it delivers a format that I absolutely think every serious website should be following for the future.

Familiarity with Performancing and Threadwatch have already sold me on it s flexibility and usability, not least with community integration and development.

I think webmasters need to stop thinking of websites as a collection of pages.

I think websites now need to see as a publishing channel – an online magazine featuring news, information & help, community, video, and more.

I think it’s especially important to leave plenty of room to manoeuvre with video, because if you can make & integrate that into a website, you have become a TV channel – and that means potential syndication in the still embryonic but rapidly expanding IPTV market.

That means tapping into the future.

My problem as a webmaster is that while WordPress suits blogs and small sites fine, it simply isn’t geared to community participation – featured author and commentator profile pages are not a default part of the set-up, plus WordPress has never really integrated community forums.

The result is that for my larger sites I often end up with one or more WordPress installs at the front-end, with a vbulletin community in the centre.

The result is a disconnection between the WordPress content and the community members, with myself having to link to the community to continue discussion, or else face having my vbulletin members sign-up for the WordPress install to comment.

The disconnection is a serious flaw in my publishing strategy, but looking at Drupal, I can see this bridge is gapped by default.

Maybe WordPress will look to address that in future, but my feeling is Matt Mullenweg has decided that WordPress’s strength is as a blogging tool, and remain focus on that, rather than introduce potential weaknesses and accusations of code bloat.

And while vbulletin offers a specialist forum platform, and has recently introduced vbulletin blogs, vbulletin is still a forum platform, not a CMS.

I’m now left looking at my websites, looking to the future, and can see that I need to try out Drupal, and explore the functionality. Will it really offer me the CMS of choice for now and the future?

If there is a possibility that it will, I need to get on the boat now.

(Note on Joomla: I’ve never liked the structure or coding – seems a very bloated, over-crowded attempt to create a CMS that somehow seems to struggle with basic functionality. Having been asked to look at SEO issues with Joomla a few times, I’ve developed an complete dislike of the platform – so much so that when a charity recently approached me looking for free SEO work on their CMS, I advised they would do better if I rebuilt it in WordPress for them.)

That sounds drastic, and, well, it is.  But so are Fast’s problems.  “Q2 results came in at $34 million – which is less than the same quarter last year (Q2 2006 saw a revenue of $39 million),” reports Adriaan Bloem on CMS Watch.  “Instead of an optimistic growth of about 40%, it’s actually down 12%, and means the company is now losing money.”

Also, Fast just completed its $23 million acquisition of RetrievalWare, and while the move was voluntary, it’s got to hurt the old bottom line.

So, is axing 128 folks the best way to accumulate money?  That remains to be seen, but Bloem doesn’t think things are looking good.  “Will this affect professional services, which as readers of the Enterprise Search Report will know, we already described as somewhat overstrained?  Will you lose the comfort of an office near you?  And as much as sales people may seem tangential to your success, if you’re in the middle of a selection or proof-of-concept, you’re not likely to enjoy a stranger answering the phone.”

I’ll give credit to Search Engine Journal’s Loren Baker for spotting this story.  Oh, and a money-saving note to Fast: a lot of store-brand food tastes just fine.

The Web Analytics report is divided up into 6 main parts:

Part 1 – How to Use this Report
Provides an overview of the various sections and depending on your role in the organization suggests the best path to follow in order to get the most out of the Web Analytics report.

Part 2 – What is Web Analytics
An overview of web analytics including history and definitions of some commonly used phrases.

Part 3 – Business Case for Web Analytics

Talks about the reasons why Web Analytics is so important in an online solution by addressing business goals such as Improving Customer Service and Increasing Revenue/Audience/Operational Efficiency. It’s followed by the report addressing the various costs that come with web analytics above and beyond licensing. This section concludes by addressing why web analytics is such a worthwhile investment.

Part 4 – Web Analytics Technology and Features

This section goes into detail about the various features that were used to compare the various web analytics vendors:

- Technology (Architecture, Availability)

- Data Collection and Processing (WebServer, JavaScript tagging, Complexity)

- Data Accuracy (Verification, Sampling, User Id)

- Data Services (Importing, Exporting, Integration)

- User Administration (Permissions, Distribution)

- Reporting (Standard Reports, Usability, Advanced Features, Dashboards, Help Features)

- Vendor Intangibles (Implementation, Support, Licensing Costs, Future Development, Stability)

Part 5 – The Web Analytics Initiative

Part 5 talks about purchasing and implementation starting from the requirements all the way to implementation and best practices.

Part 6 – The Web Analytics Vendors

This is where all the major Vendors are compared using the items addressed in part 5. The following web analytics vendors are compared in this report:

24/7
AuriQ
ClickTracks
Coremetrics
Fireclick
Google Analytics
Nedstat
Omniture
SageMetrics
Unica
Visual Sciences
WebSideStory
WebTrends
The Report can

For information email: info@cmswatch.com. I will be interviewing Lead Analyst (and author of this report), Phil Kemelor on Friday so stay tuned for some further insight via podcast.

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CMS Watch principal, Alan Pelz-Sharpe, served as lead analyst. "As enterprises increasingly see ECM technology as strategic, customers naturally look to avoid risks in product selection," said Pelz-Sharpe. "However, buyers should understand that some of the biggest names in this business are undergoing substantial transformation that will lead to shifting road maps and product sets over the next few years," Pelz-Sharpe added.

For example:

- Microsoft Office SharePoint Server ("MOSS") 2007 represents a huge amount of new code that is likely to see significant revisions over the next two years

- IBM is reconciling acquired FileNet ECM technology with its own duplicative capabilities, while supporting numerous search technologies

- Open Text continues to rationalize a plethora of overlapping products and architectures after multiple acquisitions, including Hummingbird

- Stellent’s tools and approach are likely to see major change under new owner, Oracle

While product and institutional evolution is healthy, highly rapid or unduly tepid change can raise different types of risk to enterprise technology investments. To plot the current state of product and vendor evolution among major ECM Suite suppliers, CMS Watch has developed a "Vendor Risk Profile."

"We are not making value judgments here," clarified CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne. "There is no ‘magic’ or ‘leading’ square." Rather, Byrne added, "Buyers should understand that different vendors carry very different sets of risks, and therefore enterprises need to carefully match their tolerance profile against the current state of any potential supplier." For example, Byrne noted, "Some buyers are going to be more comfortable than others working with a tool that has just been overhauled, like SharePoint."

The ECM Suites Report closely examines 10 major document and records management vendors:

- Alfresco
- EMCDocumentum
- Hyland
- IBM/FileNet
- Interwoven
- Microsoft
- Open Text/Hummingbird
- Oracle/Stellent
- Vignette
- Xerox

The report also includes shorter profiles of 20 other offerings, e.g., CA/MDY, Docubase, NewGen, Nuxeo, Objective, Saperion, TOWER, Xythos, and more.

The report is available for purchase at http://www.cmswatch.com/ECM/Report/.

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Here’s a link to page entitled Parents Report: Vaccine Update 2007 on healthykids.com. The original article comes from Parents.com but the content is featured on HealthyKids.com. Here’s the exact same article on Parents.com . Here’s the same article on LHJ.com (Ladies Home Journal) AmericanBaby.com, Child.com, Fitnessmagazine.com, More.com, midwestliving.com heck this article may be on hundreds of sites for all I know.

All of these publications are owned by the Meredith Corporation (ack sound link). Is the Meredith Corp a bunch of low down rotten black hat spammers? I don’t know if I’d go that far but if I had to guess I’d say they thought they were being “helpful” (to their users and themselves) publishing the content in multiple spots. However if they were my clients my advice would be “umm no, you guys should really stop doing that, sooner rather than later, and next week sounds like a really good time to start”.

Now looking at the SERP’s for [Report: Vaccine Update 2007] Google seems to have done a good job eliminating the duplicate listings. However I don’t know if HealtyKids.com is the best domain, it looks like they wanted it on Parents.com since that’s what the banners on all of the pages above indicate (that’s why I say you don’t want Google guessing the best spot, you want to tell Google where you want it).

What’s the takeaway here:

1) Put your content on only one page. It doesn’t matter if it’s your site, another site you own, a site you syndicate to, or your aunt’s sally’s macramé hobby website. Content should only be on one URL period.

2) if you are going to pull that web 2.0 mashup line on me and how it’s better for the users and Google should just figure it out, then you need a double mocha frappe espresso Grande with soy milk, cause it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee. Google may get it right they may get it wrong, why take the chance and cast your fate to the wind. Block the web 2.0 double tagging/publishing nonsense with robots AND meta tags … mkay (yes I said and remember people deep link).

3) Spend the time to make sure your CMS isn’t wackadoodle and letting you do stuff like this by design on purpose or by accident. I’m sure wordpress thought they were being helpful doing a lot of things that aren’t SEO-friendly.

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CMS Watch, a vendor-neutral analyst firm that evaluates content technologies, will release a new Web Analytics Report next month. The forthcoming report will sort through the complexities of selecting the right web analytics tool and will identify best practices for incorporating web analytics into broader enterprise marketing and communications investments.

Phil Kemelor serves as lead analyst for the report. "We don’t just talk about features — we look at technical architectures, data integration options, data collection methods, user administration functionality, and the multiple ways to view, slice, dice, and analyze website data." And he added, "Our planning methodology will not only enable customers to select the right vendor; it will set the blueprint for web analytics strategy going forward and help determine the right resources to ensure the success of the program."

The report closely examines 13 major Web Analytics vendors, including:

24/7
AuriQ
ClickTracks
Coremetrics
Fireclick
Google Analytics
Nedstat
Omniture
SageMetrics
Unica
Visual Sciences
WebSideStory
WebTrends

The report will be available on http://www.cmswatch.com/ in late April, 2007.

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I am thoroughly impressed with the hospitality I was shown in Milwaukee. Everyone was very helpful and welcoming. I appreciate that very much. I intend to return to Milwaukee and see more of this great city.

A special thanks to Tiffany, Bill, and Erica for the extra work they did to make sure I was taken care of during my trip.

Regarding the 3 main points I made about constructing quality websites for your clients, here are some links for additional reading.

Code Quality

• W3C Markup Validator — Enter a URL in the first box and click the “Check” button to validate any page on the Web.
• Firefox web developer extension — This is the tool I use to turn stylesheets off and do other geeky website evaluation tricks.
• Adobe on Accessibility — A great primer on accessibility.
• CSS Zen Garden — This is the site that illustrates the power of semantic markup and separating website content from presentation.

Search Engine Optimization

• The Goal of Search Marketing — Sometimes ranking first isn’t necessary to achieve your goals.
• Guide to Link Building for SEO Purposes — Linking is a powerful SEO strategy…this article discusses link building strategies in depth.
• Choosing Keywords Wisely — An overview of the keyword selection process.

Manageability

• 10 Reasons Every Website Needs a CMS — There are more than 10 but this is a good start!
• Sitemaps and SEO — An overview of the Sitemap XML protocol we discussed.

Miscellaneous

• Ten Buzzwords and What They Mean
• All Websites are Not Created Equally

I also had a few requests for information about the services my company offers as well as about Tweak, our content management system so here are links to both of those.

Agency Fusion
Tweak CMS

If you’re interested in learning more about our CMS, I recommend having one of my project managers do a brief online demonstration of the system for you. They’re really good at showing you specifically how you and your clients can benefit from using Tweak.

Please don’t hesitate to post a comment below if you have additional questions or have suggestions on my presentation. I love receiving feedback!

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That’s what keeps content management systems alive: they make the whole process of building and managing website easy for a non-developer type of person. In this post, you can learn how to choose the right content management for yourself and your website.

What is a content management system?

A content management system is the web software that lets you create a website without knowing any web programming skills, such as HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL and such. Instead, you can put up a website by simply pasting your post/article from the Notepad and pressing the “Publish” button.

Normally, CMSs have their own structure, such as blogs (blogging software), forums (forum software) and general content management systems, such as Joomla, etc. However, there are other systems that let you create your own site structure and layout, such as Drupal.

Before we go into picking the system, you need to define what you need before doing anything.

Define what you need

Before you even start searching for a content management system, you need to know why you are creating a website.

• Is it for your business?
• For your hobby?
• Do you want to sell any digital or tangible stuff?

Also, you’ll need to know what all you and your visitors want to do on the website.

• Do you want to just publish articles?
• Do you want to have a blog?
• Do you want a forum?
• Any classifieds section?
• An online shop, maybe?

• Do you want to build and inform a mailing list?
• Do you want others to do anything on your site?

Obviously, each of the choices will place several requirements for a CMS, such as an e-commerce (online store) module, a blog, a forum, other customization stuff and more extensions, such as mailing lists and user permissions.

So, before you even start to seek a CMS, create a list of what all you and your want to do on your website. Use your imagination. How would you and your people really like to communicate and share things on a website.

Once you have identified what you want to do, you’ll need to translate the wishes to specific system features, such as basic content publishing, a blog, a forum or a shop module with additional plug-ins (many systems allow anyone contribute a plugin or a module to enhance the platform).

After you have a list of features/wishes in front of you, you can start shopping.

Know where to look

The most obvious stop to look for a CMS is cmsmatrix.org.

Here you can select what you want your CMS to do and hit “Search”. The list will have what you’ll need, most likely. If you want, you can also select other options from the matrix, but I’d recommend not limiting yourself with something you may not need or are not absolutely determined about.

You can learn more about the CMS by clicking on its name. Bear in mind that the data may be outdated (a quick scan revealed that Drupal is incorrectly listed as not being able to have classifieds, while there is the classified ads module available on the main Drupal website).

The next step would be OpenSourceCMS.com.

Here, you can select the CMS you want (albeit through a not very usable menu) and login as an administrator. As you’ll still have to manage the CMS somehow, this should give you a good feel of what the CMS is about and how easy/hard it is to work with.

And another way to learn about various content management systems is to ask around on your favorite forums and search in your favorite search engine for ‘how to choose a CMS’ or ‘how to pick a content management system’. I am sure you’ll find a lot to absorb there. (You’ll find a list of useful articles in the pots below).

What to consider?

Of course, the main criterion when picking a platform for your website is what you and your people will be doing on it: writing articles, talking on a forum, posting ads/job listings, etc. However, another thing to remember include:

• how easy it is for you to use the system
• how easy it is for the people to use the website
• how accessible (to the people) and friendly (to the search engines) it is
• whether it can handle heavy load (through built-in load balancing/management/optimization), if you plan to develop a highly popular website
• if you can easily create other site sections within the system
• whether there’s significant documentation on the website
• whether there’s a forum on the main website to ask questions

Normally, you’ll learn everything you need to know, if you read various CMS comparison posts, such as these:

• Open source or commercial CMS
• What criteria to consider?
• How to choose a CMS?
• 2006 CMS award winners
• Drupal vs Joomla (Drupal forums discussion)
• Drupal vs Joomla (Joomla forums discussion)
• Push Vs. Pull – The Battle for the Best CMS
• They hate Drupal, they love Drupal
• Why I love Drupal

Drupal

Now that you can estimate what CMS you need (or may have already found the one), I’ll tell you why I like Drupal:

• the greatest advantage of Drupal is that you have the power to determine site structure
• also, it is quite very human friendly (thanks to response via suggestions forums and special usability studies)
• moreover, it is quite search engine friendly (URLs are crawlable, the text is automatically and semantically correct formatted)
• you can have literally anything: publish articles, have a blog, a forum, a shop, a classifieds section or anything you want: you can create your own page type and system with the right modules
• there’s a great handbook, a forum and lots of contributed modules (may as well apply to a couple of other platforms, though)
• Drupal is very performance-oriented: it works slightly better than Joomla, has a special “Throttle” module to stay through the heavy traffic and is well optimized internally
• you can run multiple websites from one installation (and with one or many databases)
• one can migrate from any other platform: WordPress, phpBB, etc
• all site sections, including a blog and a forum, will be integrated and shown with the same layout
• you can search through all the site with search (which won’t work, if you are using a 3d party forum platform)

Of course, there are more advantages of Drupal I missed, as I have only been studying it for a month or two. Overall, I can’t imagine a better platform to build a site on (and if I get time, I’ll move Improve the Web to it, too).

However, you also need to realize that you need to make sure the system will work for you and that you’ll learn to work with it. Otherwise, you’ll be in trouble.

So, I found it, what next?

After you find a platform to setup or test, you’ll need to read the installation instructions for the system, usually found on a highly visible place on the website and with the installation files. Typically, you’ll need to:

• download the copy from the CMS website
• unzip the archive to your local folder
• copy the files to your web server through a FTP program
• create a MySQL database, along with a user (with a name and password) to use the database
• specify the database path, name and the user login and password
• set the CMS settings, structure and layout as an admin
• start publishing

Normally, the whole process takes about half an hour (it is slow to copy that many files at once), but expect to spend more than an hour on your first installation and to read a lot on the website.

When creating your website, you need to remember to:

• plan way ahead
• go step by step
• gives your visitors a way to cooperate/communicate
• less is more (number of pages, plugins, links on a page, etc)
• quality beats quantity

In essence, it all means that you only need to do on your website that you need to do. If you want to blog, do so. But don’t start a couple of more sections on the website, then a forum and then another couple of blogs on the same website – let your visitors adapt to the changes and let your site grow steadily.

Rounding up

Though sometimes it is clear what decision to make, it may well be worth reading and reading more articles about picking a platform for yourwebsite to make up your mind completely. Only then you’ll be able to create what you want without restricting yourself.

Another moment to remember that if you can’t pick a platform, you can always run a test site somewhere (on a test domain or on your local computer with WAMP) and see how it goes. If anything, try another CMS.

In the end, it may be a matter of taste and personal preference. Let it be. Don’t worry about not following someone’s advice or your opinion being different from others’ – you need to make your own decisions.

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