SEOecom, Melbourne, Australia – We are a company that specializes in Drupal and provides free online courses on how to get started with Drupal. We have just completed a massive overhaul of our Drupal site. Most people are amazed to know that the entire site runs with just one theme and contributed modules from this community. I will list all of them and the theme elements to hopefully inspire others starting up in Drupal, to create complex sites – looking any way you want by keeping things simple.
The theme – The theme for our site has 15 regions – 2 pre content regions, a header, a pre content, post content, three right side bars, two overlapping sidebars, three bottom blocks, footer and of course content block. Using these regions as blocks, we are able to create different look and feel based on URLs or content types (CCK). This is somewhat similar to playing with Lego blocks in that with these blocks and a bit of imagination, you can create any sort of look and feel.
Modules: Here is a list of Drupal contributed modules used at our site. I will also share experiences about other modules later when we have had a chance to use them:
1. Audio: In our content section we have used Audio to submit podcasts to Feed burner and iTunes. Views module is used to create the itunes feeds.
2. CCK: No site is really complete without CCKs. At our site we are only using text CCKs, basically to control internal content from external content, using blocks.
3. From the base Drupal modules:
- Aggregator: Drupal RSS feeds are handled via Feedburner
- Blog: Used in our content section for articles
- Forum: This is a new addition and we chose to use the core Drupal forum as it provides the best forum for QA and threaded discussion. This is something I started a week ago, and wish we had started earlier.
- Poll: You can see this is in one of the bottom blocks throughout the content section.
- Statistics: Log and track node hits, usage, etc.
4. Backup & Migrate: I rarely see anyone give credit to this module, which I think is most essential and should be part of the base module. The importance of backups is something that one cannot stress enough.
5. Bookmark module: This allows our readers to bookmark our site from the content section
6. Diggthis: A basic Digg module that is taking a back seat to the Service links module
7. FCKeditor: Currently the active WYSIWG editor. We tried both TinyMCE and prefer FCKeditor which opens in a new window to selectively use WYSIWG editor.
8. Google Search: For local Google search of contents
9. Meta tags: Another essential module for SEO tasks of setting keywords and meta description.
10. Pathauto: Dynamically create URLs that allow for custom content types, example seen at SEOecom forum
11. Pdfview: Allows content to be printed as pdfs
12. Service Links: Allows selective content types to be bookmarked at Facebook, Stumble upon, google, etc.
13. Sitemap: Automatically creates the human sitemap for our entire Drupal site
14. Survey: Another essential module that allows us to send surveys to our members with our current theme
15. Technorati: Enables Technorati tagging for our content
16. Token: Needed by other modules
17. Webform: Enables creation of web forms with ease and collection of data in to excel spreadsheets
18. Views Module: Enables the use of Views for managing RSS feeds and dynamic URLs for contents by categories
19. jRating, JQuery and Voting API modules: These allow our visitors to rate our content
All the sites we have built for our customers have been Drupal based. In terms of contribution to the community we have developed 30 Drupal training videos on how to get started for beginners to creating complex ecommerce sites using the base modules. I am aware of hundreds of sites that have started using these videos which are also a part of the Drupal handbook section.
Other modules that we are actively testing include:
1. Drupal Facebook integration: Waiting for all the issues to be ironed out. In the meantime, we are using the Facebook RSS application to publish our content to our Facebook friends.
2. Open ID integration: We had this working, but our audience did not appear ready for this, When we migrate to Drupal 6, this is one of the modules we look to incorporate.
I want to thank the Drupal community, the many developers who have contributed their time and effort to create this marvelous content management system (the best in my opinion), that many can express ideas with powerful websites that are search friendly and are up and running quickly with a zero budget. We, in turn, have passed this forward by developing Drupal based sites for non profit organizations, and hopefully inspiring others. Thanks again to all the souls who have put this amazing content management system in place.
Joe Matthew
Melbourne, Australia
