“I want to update my website myself” is a commonly-heard plea from site owners who’ve realised that the job of keeping the content of their websites up to date is too important a job to be left to web designers. In this article I’m going to explain why you should consider managing your content yourself and what you might look for in a web content management system (CMS).

More about web content management systems

This is simply a wish list of functions I’d like to see in a Drupal contact management module. I may well be turning at least some of these into code if I don’t find someone else has already done it - in either case I’ll write a new post and link back here. Comments are very welcome.

• The ability to manage contacts who aren’t system users (as well as ones that are). Contacts might have only a phone number or snail mail address initially.
• Flexibility in adding custom fields. I anticipate the answer to this will be to use CCK.
• Fexibility in querying. Is there a way to generate views dynamically? I haven’t yet investigated. An interactive query builder would be ideal.
• Ability to raise an action (such as “cold call”) against a set of contacts and record progress.
• Per-contact action log.
• Flexible status indication with colour-coding.

(Yes, I do know about CiviCRM, and I don’t like it. It is so hard to customise it might as well be closed-source proprietary software, in my experience.)

It’s a question that often comes up: which web content management system is the best? Or, just as commonly, which is better out of CMS A and CMS B?

The answer is always going to be: it depends. Disappointing, eh? But it’s worth looking at the main factors involved in making a decision, all the same.

read more about choosing the best web CMS

centrespread is a great site for the discussion of magazines. Site owner Adam Foster asked me to help him by creating a form so visitors can suggest new magazines to be featured.

I made a WordPress plugin for him that submits user input to the database. It’s built on top of the widely-used cforms ii plugin.

“Absolutely 100% perfect. Thank you so much for your help. It is good that there are good people out there who care to do work to perfection as if it were their own.” — Adam Foster, centrespread.

Drupal 6.0 was released a few days ago and I am very much looking forward to working with it. There are some great usability enhancements that’ll make using the CMS backend a lot easier, and there are many improvements to the API that promise to make module and theme development more productive.

However, until the CCK and Views modules for the new release are ready, it won’t be suitable for developing major sites, so I don’t anticipate migrating to version 6.0 completely for a few months.

If you have a site that’s still on 4.7, though, it’s definitely advisable to make the move to Drupal 5 as soon as possible. Should you need any help with that migration process, let me know.

The brief for the web site of this popular North Devon tourist attraction was to create an attractive modern site with a clear organisational structure which would be maintainable by L&B staff.

Given the large amount of content with varying needs for its presentation and management Drupal was the obvious choice. I created a custom theme and companion module that matched the major divisions of the site and installed and configured other appropriate modules. One of the challenges was in the Visitor section, which is internationalized (in seven different languages) whereas the rest of the site is not.

The result is both aesthetically pleasing (the graphic design in large part thanks to Nik Barrie, the L&B webmaster) and highly functional.

“The web site was excellent, containing a vast amount of information, supported by photography of the highest standard. With an easy to browse layout, the pages provided all the information a potential visitor was likely to need, as well appealing to the narrow gauge railway enthusiast.” - VisitBritain inspection report.

[ Edited 8th June 2008: I'm not doing it this way any more. Read this more recent post for the lowdown. ]

It’s a frequently asked question - how do you get multiple blogs from a single installation of Wordpress? And the answer is surprisingly simple, if a little technical.
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I was asked by unit9.com to help develop the backend administration for Metro International’s new website. This involved radical customisation of the Drupal content management system so Metro staff could easily maintain the content of this beautifully designed site with its many complex page structures. It doesn’t look like a Drupal site, does it?

“Working with Alfred from Likemind was great, he knows how to use Drupal to do what is needed and make the project happen. I am very happy with his insight into what features will be useful to the end user without laboring on what will not be as effective.” — Yates Buckley, unit9.

The Great Torrington Cavaliers are an energetic local fundraising organization. They had an existing website but they were struggling to cope with the changes required whenever they ran a new event. They also wanted a site which would act as a centre for the exchange of information amongst their membership. I chose to use Drupal to build the site which, with its great flexibility and power, has made it much easier for the Cavaliers to publish information and present it in a well-organised fashion. The new site also has a much stronger visual design than the old one.

“Likemind Web services have helped bring the Great Torrington Cavaliers into the 21st century.

Alfred’s knowledge and understanding of the extremely clever Drupal software is second to none. I gave him our requirements and within a couple of days he had a demo site up and running for me to look at.

Having used Microsoft FrontPage previously I had a job getting my head around this new way of administering, and made several desperate requests to Alfred to get me back on track. He was always there to help and never once made it feel awkward or inconvenient.

I would have no hesitation in recommending Likemind to anyone for the website needs.

Thank you Alfred from ALL the Cavaliers — ” — Steve Blake Secretary, Great Torrington Cavaliers

Phorum and Drupal are two of my favourite open source software packages. Phorum is in my opinion the best of the many PHP-based standalone forum products, while Drupal is my favoured CMS.

Drupal is not without its headaches, and one of them is its own built in forum, which is not very flexible. It also fails to work at all if you install certain Drupal add-ons. This was my position in the middle of last week: having committed to providing forum functionality for a site, but unable to get it working.

Since I am comfortable with Phorum my immediate thought was to look for a way of integrating it and fortunately most of the work had already been done by Maurice Makaay, one of the most energetic contributors to the development of Phorum. He’d written a piece of code which makes it possible to embed Phorum inside other applications, so all I needed to do was to supply the appropriate wrapper for Drupal, which took about a day and a half’s work.

The phorum integration code is now available as a Drupal module. I hope some other folk will find it useful.