"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

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’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.

Comments

IBM’s tutorial discussed their choice of Drupal as the platform upon which their tutorial project will be based. With Drupal in place, the next part of the nicely-crafted tutorial shifted to design.

An overview of the process for crafting the design solution for fictitious International Business Council showed four basic phases:

Analysis
Design
Prototyping
Development

The process helps keep the development team focused on what the user wants and needs to accomplish with the site. It isn’t a fixed process; as any developer knows, there is considerable back and forth based on what the client wants.

During analysis, IBM noted how the development team needed to have business goals and objectives articulated clearly for them. As this is an internal website, feedback should be gathered from users who will have to be hands-on with the system regularly.

The design phase gave the development team the opportunity to nail down the functional requirements for the site. This leads back in to user feedback, since developers will have to identify the type of user and how one will likely proceed through the site.

IBM’s process also included content, navigation, interaction, and the “visual language” needed in the site’s construction. These foundational pieces allow the developers to build a prototype design.

Once the prototype has been refined to suit the technical requirements of the project, and the interface has been created and updated, functional development can begin. The fun starts here, as IBM listed coding and testing being part of the fun in actually building the site.

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A new tutorial series has started at IBM. This one will take visitors through the process of designing, developing, and deploying a web site, using resources available from the open source community.

The collaborative website, for the fictional International Business Council, requires a variety of groupware-oriented services to satisfy the needs of the phantom client. A quick review of the requirements looks suspiciously similar to those of a product provided by a certain technology company in Redmond, Washington.

From IBM’s project page: “The new, customized Web site must have document storage, discussion groups, specialized workgroups, conference scheduling, schedule session descriptions, session expiration, and other tasks.”

From Microsoft SharePoint’s page: “Using the combined collaboration features of Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003, users in your organization can easily create, manage, and build their own collaborative Web sites and make them available throughout the organization.”

IBM will educate its site visitors about developing this type of site throughout its tutorial. One facet of the initial setup involved finding a framework upon which to base the project.

After considering several open source options – Mambo, Typo3, Ruby on Rails, Movable Type, WordPress, and TextPattern – IBM’s project chose Drupal for its framework. (No mention of Joomla, oddly enough, but that’s probably because it’s a Mambo fork.)

Drupal is written in PHP, and powers the Spread Firefox website; also of interest is their summer training program they plan to conduct in India, our readers there may wish to note.

Drupal will serve as IBM’s test bed for construction of IBC’s new presence. IBM trio of tutorial taskmasters wrote of their rationale for selecting Drupal:

With the selection of the framework complete, the series will turn to design and other topics related to the completion of the progress. IBM’s reputation needs no embellishment here; developers holding an interest in constructing a collaborative portal with open source technology will benefit from IBM’s insights.

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Phil Bradley – “I want to” blog for Clever things with RSS. Phil was recently named a Search Engine Watch contributor, congrats Phil!

Peter Scott’s RSS Compendium. Excellent and huge list of RSS tools, information and helper apps.

Create social bookmark links for blogs or web pages from Claus Schmidt – not too much unlike the TopRank Social Bookmark Creator

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery: Drupal module for RSS Buttons based on TwisterMC’s TopRank RSS Button Maker

Lee Odden is President and Founder of
TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog
marketing and online public relations. He’s been cited as a search
marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and
The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs
with top BtoB companies of all sizes. Odden shares his marketing
expertise at Online Marketing Blog offering
daily news, interviews and best practices.