Knaddison.com - Drupal

Interview With Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com About Migrating to Drupal and SEO

greggles — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 14:14:01 +0000

Aaron is a relatively famous SEM/SEO and has obviously built a lot of sites. After he migrated his main site, SEOBook.com to Drupal and then even made a optimistic prediction about the future of Drupal I was curious about Aaron’s experiences and wanted to see what he had to say about the process and why he likes Drupal. He was kind enough to respond with these answers.

1. What initially motivated you to migrate seobook.com from MovableType to Drupal?

I originally used MovableType, but I wanted to create a site with premium content and permissions based access. The Drupal premium module facilitated that quite well. Plus my developer really liked Drupal and saw it as being extensible enough to do everything I wanted (integrate with our affiliate program, create a structured online training program , offer page by page control of premium or regular access, allow me to offer free snippets on some of the premium content, integrate with vBulletin forums, and integrate with the Paypal IPN).

2. What CMS (or mix of CMS) do you use as the basis for new projects?

Honestly most of my projects usually come in a couple waves. A small mini-site using flat files or server side incles, put up so I can start promoting it right away, and then as I decide to grow it out I typically switch off to Drupal or Wordpress on most sites. The really easy small and bloggy type projects get Wordpress, but Drupal is used on the more complex ones.

3. Was anything about Drupal particularly hard to get used to? Hard to migrate to? Anything particularly easy and beneficial?

Honestly my programmers did a lot of the work and I could not have done it all without them (I am no good at programming)! I have used Drupal for years though…I ran a site called Threadwatch which was powered by Drupal.

The things that I have found cool about using Drupal recently are how easy it is to install most modules. And I love being able to use conditional blocks. It is kinda addictive thinking of things to add to the site.

4. What features surprised you the most after the migration?

I think the database load was a bit surprising. The site was on a really weak server, and MovableType was flat file. Once the site was live with Drupal it was much more database intensive. With our decent traffic load we needed to upgrade to a real server.

5. What do you feel is the best CMS for SEO? Is there such a thing or does it depend on how you use it?

I think strategy is important, but a bad CMS can hold even the brightest person back. Drupal is my favorite CMS, but I am probably biased towards it since my main site is powered by Drupal. :)

For small sites I like just rolling them by hand for optimal control over every small issue, but for larger sites I like Drupal and Wordpress a lot. Some of the plugins that allow you to use different page titles and h1 tags, and other related tweaks help boost traffic.

6. Any tips for improving Drupal and specifically SEO of Drupal?

Make sure you enable clean URLs. Nodewords is good for page specific meta description tags. Make sure to redirect example.com to www.example.com (or the other way around)…you don’t want 2 versions of your site getting indexed.

If you use Drupal for a blog I think careful consideration of categories and promotion of featured content are important. Using a custom homepage that introduces people to your topic can help convert passer-byers into subscribers and later buyers. Our Blogger’s Guide to SEO http://www.seobook.com/bloggers (now available in 20 languages - if you count Pig Latin) can help offer some tips here as well.

If you want to have a rather broad and diverse site it helps to map it out ahead of time so you can put things in logical locations. For example, it makes sense to put a forum on a subdomain, especially if it is not monitored as well as your blog or news channel is.

Hot Drupal Videos for Drupal 6

greggles — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 19:57:28 +0000

The coolest thing to stick on your blog this days (since the release of Drupal6) is a series of screencast videos about Drupal6. Below are some of the videos about Drupal6 and the HTML you need to embed them into your blog. This page should make it easy for you to help spread the word about the Drupal6: Just pick your favorite video (or 3) and post them to your blog.

Note that for the first three videos they are “cc-by-sa” which requires the attribution link be to MasteringDrupal.com while the third is by Addison Berry of Lullabot.

New Features in Drupal6

Whey even bother with an upgrade? Well, the New Features in Drupal6 video should help get you excited to upgrade.

<a href="http://www.masteringdrupal.com/">MasteringDrupal.com</a>

Drupal6 - The International Release

This version of Drupal includes a whole new level of internationalization (i18n) in addition to the localization (l10n) which has been in Drupal for years. This makes Drupal an even better choice for sites that need multi-language capabilities.

<a href="http://www.masteringdrupal.com/">MasteringDrupal.com</a>

Upgrading from Drupal5 to Drupal6

Great, now you’re excited to upgrade. Let’s get to the actual upgrade process.

<a href="http://www.masteringdrupal.com/">MasteringDrupal.com</a>

What? No Drupal5 install? You can get right to installing Drupal6

The Drupal6 Installation is the easiest install yet.

By <a href="http://rocktreesky.com/">Addison Berry</a> of <a href="http://www.lullabot.com/">Lullabot</a>

Security Team Activitiy in 2007 by the Numbers

greggles — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 13:15:58 +0000

While the rest of this post looks back at 2007, I’d like to throw some attention to the security presentation at DrupalCon Boston.

2007 was a busy year for the Drupal Security Team. That’s not to say that Drupal is unsafe but that security requires a lot of work. The nature of the work makes it hard to communicate exactly what is going on. So here is an attempt to share some information about the past year for the security team.

Releases, Reports, and Discussion

The team issued 37 Security Announcements (SAs), representing more than 100 patches released. Each SA requires at least 1 patch and 2 reviews (review before the patch is made to find other security holes and a second review to ensure that the hole has actually been fixed). Most issues involve multiple patches and multiple reviews. Each also requires the SA to be written and reviewed, the patches to be committed, release nodes created, published, drafts copied from security.drupal.org to drupal.org, and flipping publish/status bits on a few nodes around our infrastructure. All of that work was done 37 times last year or approximately once every 10 days. For comparison, 2006 totaled 32 SAs.

For each issue, there are more problems reported which turn out not to be issues. See Howto report a security issue and My Site Was Defaced (“hacked”) What Should I do Now? for more information about how to report issues properly and with sufficient information. You can get a sense for the amount of discussion of security related topics and also of false reports based on the volume of emails to the internal mailing list:

Individual mails to the security team:

Month	2007	2006
Jan	263	412
Feb	168	356
Mar	149	470
Apr	115	145
May	140	399 (rough spam filter added ~here)
Jun	155	182
Jul	267 (Manual moderation added ~here)	106
Aug	104	138
Sep	186	97
Oct	352	214
Nov	152	153
Dec	155	148

I don’t see any great trends in there, but it at least shows the volume of mail that we are dealing with and the fact that while there is relatively little public discussion (aside from the occasional notable exception) there is still quite an enormous amount of discussion.

If we look at just the months where manual moderation was in place (to be sure there was no spam inflating the numbers) that’s an average of 189 emails per month or 6 emails per day.

To help spread this load, the team recruited several new members: ajk, goba, greggles, hunmonk, scor, Chris Johnson, dmitrig01, aclight. Realizing that most security cracks are social ones, we also removed people who were no longer active in the team or the project. Making sure that we have only active and committed members is part of keeping the project secure, but is not an indication of dislike for the people nor should it detract from the effort they have provided over the years. Priorities change and we thank folks for the work they have done.

Spreading the word, Education, and Prevention

In addition to emails, patches, and reviews, the team took the following actions to help reduce security problems in the future.

Presentation in Barcelona [presentation slides in the handbook](http://drupal.org/node/218037)
Email announcements (~13,000 subscribers), RSS Subscriptions to the security feed (2,197 according to an analysis by Drupal.org admin extraordinaire [nnewton](http://association.drupal.org/user/Narayan_Newton)) We don’t have numbers for last year for these attributes.
Update status module will provide an enormous help in getting the word out about new security releases. Already it is reaching a crowd roughly as big as the security announcement newsletters. This will help users keep their sites up to date and will also give the security team some data about how quickly users update which will be enormously useful in helping us learn where to spend more of our effort.
Edits to handbook pages - in short, approximately 5 new pages and 44 of enhancements to existing pages Long form:
> Security Team: 7 edits
Handling Text Securely: 1 edit
File uploads - completely new section, 6 edits
How to use db\_rewrite\_sql: 2 edits
Session IDs: 1 edit
Javascript: new page, 1 edit
Using FAPI to avoid CSRF: new page, 1 edit
Security Team: 20 edits
Report: 2 edits
Contacted by Security team, now what?: 3 edits

Hopefully this gives some insight into how the team works and what the workload is like. If you have any feedback for the security team, we’re listening.

Drupal User Group Skill Levels

greggles — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:14:27 +0000

At the DrupalCon Barcelona one of the panels I lead was about (Dis)Organizing Local User Group Events. I still haven’t decided what to talk about at the upcoming Boston Drupalcon but I’m sure it will be Roxxorz. I’ve been ~~roped~~ pursuaded into discussing SEO in Drupal and Userpoints. Personally, I think Prediction Markets are interesting enough to merit their own presentation (now to see about getting them ready to demo).

Now, that plug out of the way, what I really want to discuss is a problem that faces most Drupal User Groups.

Local User Group Two Hump Problem

About 2 years ago I started reaching out to folks in Denver to start the Denver/Boulder Drupal User Group (DBUG for short). From the first meeting it seemed clear: the skill levels were grouped around two distinct and competing centers:

Lots of people were still trying to figure out how to pronounce Drupal - we knew them from the second they showed up “Is this the drooo-PAWL meeting?” And then there was a nother group at the other end, the “Yeah, I just patched the form.inc so I could thrombulate the widgetizer.” There were relatively few people in the middle or at either extreme.

I wanted to make sure that the meetings were useful to people and wanted to expand them. So, I always asked how people found the meetings, what time of day would be best, what subject matter people wanted to hear about, and a few other choice questions. One problem that we consistently had was that the interests in the meetings were divided between these two groups. The “newbies” just want some hand-holding as they experiment with installing modules and configuring CCK/Views. The people that have already jumped the suck threshold wanted to talk about more advanced things (instantiating the thrombulated widgetizers).

While everyone was nice, I’m pretty sure that lots of folks left meetings feeling like the topics were either way to introductory or way to over their heads (or both).

Possible Solutions

Gregory Heller remarked that the SEADUG has had some success splitting the meeting based on time. They start the meeting at 16:00 with a “drop in” feeling in a coffee shop. Folks are invited to finish out the work day and “talk shop”. This provides a natural selection - “Drupal pros” can go because they’ll still be doing work and talking about Drupal. Hobbyists can’t explain why they have to leave work early for this meeting so they come later…and the real meeting starts at 18:00 where they discuss more broadly applicable topics from a more structured (and pre-announced) agenda. Having a pre-announced agenda is something that most folks at the Barcelona meeting agreed helped bring in more people and also set expectations for what topics would be covered. If you set expectations, it’s harder for people to get upset that the content was inappropriate.

In Denver one tool we used was to start with every answering 5 questions - “Name? Interest & experience with Drupal? What you want to learn? What you want to teach? How you heard about the meeting?” These questions are useful for establishing some natural “mini-birds-of-a-feather” sessions. Some of my favorite meetings in Denver were the early ones where we had no agenda and so instead everyone sat there awkwardly for 5 minutes and then someone said “hey, new person I just met, I’m interested in learning about X which you just said you know well. Can you teach me?” Then 3 or 4 people would break apart and talk about that. It allowed for the group to cater to both skill levels. That didn’t happen at every meeting though, and the awkwardness was sometimes really awkward. So, we went to the agenda style. In spite of encouraging it, we can never really get back the “BOF” style that worked so well except at the very end of the meeting when it’s time to shut down.

I’ve also been to a few other ‘software meetups’ and find that they tend to be split at these same points, the local PHP Users group, the Linux Users and Enthusiasts group. It’s a hard balance to make and I’m not sure what the best solution is. Hopefully some of these ideas are helpful. For more discussion on the topic and tips on how to start a group in your area, be sure to check out the Drupal Event Organization group.

Announcing Drupal Dashboard - Essential Information for Busy Professionals

greggles — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 00:33:15 +0000

If you liked the Drupal Digest, you’ve probably been sad the last few months wondering what happened. Well, Drupal Dashboard is finally here to fill in the hole that was left in your hearts when DrupalDigest.com was usurped.

What is the Drupal Dashboard

It’s a simple concept: if you try to pay attention to all the sources of information coming from Drupal you will quickly die of information overload. Instead, we will have a few people paying attention to these information feeds and then summarizing them for you. For now, there is a Important CVS Commit feed and an Important Module Releases feed. If you would like to add a filtered version of something (the development mailing list? drupal.org/planet?) please contact me. You can read more information about Drupal Dashboard like how it was built in the About Drupal Dashboard page.

My favorite tag lines for the Dashboard: “All wheat, no chaff” or “Essential information for busy professionals” or “We read everything so you don’t have to.” Yeah. If you notice any problems with the site I’d love to hear about those too - it’s an infant still. There’s plenty left on the todo list not least of which is “fix all bugs.”

Drupal SEO Video Tutorials (and i18n and l10n and new features)

I recently did some SEO related videos and for one of them I needed a site that I could submit to Google webmaster tools, that’s why I’m finally getting around to doing this now. But the important detail to note in that last sentence is that there are Video tutorials about SEO with Drupal. Following hot on the heels of the New Features in Drupal6 video is the New i18n and l10n features in Drupal6 video. On the MasteringDrupal site you’ll also see a signup form, if you submit your email address you’ll get a link to the SEO screencast series. I’m biased, but I feel that these are valuable additions to the growing body of videos that help new Drupal users become power users.

If you want to help promote the i18n and l10n videos - please digg away:

Well Worth the Effort

After showing it to him, moshe, the original DrupalDigest.com builder/owner said

bless you, greggles.

That made the effort with it for me!

Are you a Full Time Drupal Developer?

greggles — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 19:24:47 +0000

What does it mean to be a Full Time Drupal Developer? Are you one? Take this simple test to find out:

[X] I smile when I see “by greggles” in a cvs commit message.
[X] My life partner can hear and understands the difference between Drupalcon and Druplicon.
[X] I know the node ids of my favorite nodes 59, 318, 92900.
[X] My work is focused around Drupal. If a project comes along for another tool I convince them to use Drupal or refer them to someone else.
[X] My hobbies and outside interests are either related to Drupal, or have a group website built in Drupal.
[X] My “Personal Battle Plan” involves features and bugfixes, not weapons.

What else defines a “Drupal Developer” ?

Enthusiast Groups Tips on Making your Company Social-Media Savvy

greggles — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 13:05:46 +0000

The Enthusiast Group is an exciting company built around providing social networking and citizen media platforms for passionate folks. For nearly 2 years now they’ve been building sites to support communities around adrenaline sports (YourMtb.com, YourClimbing.com, YourHorseSports.com, YourCycling.com, YourRunning.com). This has given them great experience in the world of social networks and user-generated-content (citizen journalism) including some relatively novel uses like Grassroots coverage of major events.

They just released a white paper (email submission required, but I’ll vouch for them not being spammers) and even though my job and hobby is working with social networks I still learned a lot from the document. It’s a 31 page pdf that provides some great resources: background on the topic including definitions of some key terms and phrases, real-life case studies of a variety of sites, and links to other valuable resources on the topic.

At the same time they’ve also started offering a new set of services that includes building a specific social network/grassroots media site for any brand, cause, or focus. It’s a really neat idea and exciting to see them growing like this. Much like “books were just the beginning” for Amazon, it appears that adrenaline sports were just the beginning for Enthusiast Group.

Oh yeah, and of course it’s all built on the best php cms.

Simple Strategies to Pick a Drupal Theme

greggles — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 19:31:19 +0000

I often get asked for advice about picking a Drupal theme. Themes are extensions of the Drupal content management system which allow a site admin to quickly change the look and feel of their site. You just download the theme you like, install it, select it, and your whole site has a new design.

However, like finding high quality Drupal modules there are some good rules of thumb to follow in your theme search.

Strategy 1: Find A Drupal Theme Close to What you Want

This is the simplest solution. I like to review the screenshots on the Drupal Themes page. Some themes don’t have screenshots, but those are often lower quality anyway. If you see a theme that sounds good or looks good, the next stop is to head over to the Drupal Theme Garden which has live demos of all the themes. You can test things out without installing them. This is also a great place to browse the themes.

Often, though, a theme that looks close will quickly fall apart on installation and fixing it can take more work than modifying a solid base theme. So, if you find that your “close enough” theme is falling apart, you might need to take a new strategy.

Strategy 2: Modify a Solid Base Theme

Zen and Bluebreeze are a great base theme. Change a few images, a few colors, a few css properties and you can be all set. For the more “old school” folks who like table-based designs the previous standard was the Box Grey theme.

Ok, but what if you have a great design, you don’t want to fight with anyone else’s styles you just want to build up your theme.

Strategy 3: The Solid Foundation

So, you’re already a designer and you are comfortable with CSS and you want a blank slate to start from. Great - use the Hunchbaque theme by Al Steffen (aka zarabadoo). This is a solid base theme, but is just black on white to begin with.

Strategy 4: Build it from the Ground Up

Check out the theme developer’s guide in the handbook. From there you can build very precisely whatever you want.

Other tips? What other themes do other people like? What are your strategies for building themes?

Drupal Introduction at CLUE Denver Meeting (Colorado Linux Users and Enthusiasts)

greggles — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 14:43:05 +0000

Drupal Introduction for Denver Linux Group

Tuesday night the folks at CLUE South (in the Denver Tech Center) had a “CMS Panel” that ended up collapsing into a Drupal and Mambo/Joomla! discussion. As I was writing my presentation I happened upon Gabor Hojtsy’s request for new maintainers for modules including the S5 module. It seemed like a nice coincidence and since I found the S5 module to be useful in preparing my presentation I’m now the maintainer.

So, you can now see the slides that I used last night as a Drupal book or as an s5 presentation - including Drupal style theming.

Drupal as Presentation Maker - s5 Module

This is, in my opinion, a real boon for conferences and organizations that host presentations. You no longer need to worry about “which slideshow technology do we use” or “where do participants go to download the slides. Now everyone can use html or markdown syntax to make bulleted lists in Drupal book pages and then click the “export to s5” button and your presentation is all set to go.

Once I figure out a few details to make the system easier to use and the theme a little stronger I’ll be committing the changes, release an improved version of that Drupal s5 theme, and branch s5 for Drupal5. If you want to try out the s5 module for Drupal5 now, the HEAD in CVS is currently compatible with Drupal5.

Future of Drupal Presentations

In researching and preparing my presentation I was surprised and saddened by the stock material out there. There is some good material in the handbooks on the Presentations page and the Events section. What I’d really like to see is a more centralized hub of information - something like talks.php.net that would help put all this content together. And of course since Drupal is a do-ocracy I’m willing to help build that resource though I need to check off a few more things from my todo list first. If you are also interested in a hub for presentations like that please contact me (either via a comment here or in one of the myriad other ways).

Drupal Siting: jQuery gets Proper Plugin Repository

greggles — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 14:51:58 +0000

I had heard weeks ago from chatting with Mike Hostetler that he was working on a code repository for jQuery plugins which got me quite excited. Historically getting specific versions of jQuery plugins has been a little difficult. Now there’s a great jQuery Plugin Repository that replaces the Wiki. The recent jQuery Blog post discusses the new system:

The new repository comes with a few features that are sure to help users to find what they’re looking for and determine which plugins will best suit their needs. There’s the (jQuery-based) ratings widget to let you know how highly others value each plugin. The ratings are viewable by all, and you can rate them yourself by simply registering on the site with a user name and email address. You’ll also have easier access to change logs, demos, and documentation, as well as bug reporting and feature requests.

Of course the site has tell-tale signs that it’s running Drupal and other signs show that it’s running the well regarded project module to manage the releases, issues, feature requests, and module listings.

Congrats to Mike and the jQuery web team on an important job well done and congrats to Drupal and Derek Wright (dww) for being selected as the platform behind yet another plugin repository. Now, if we can only see about getting those fivestar ratings available on the Drupal.org module download page ;)