'Net Features : drupal

Transactional Email for Drupal

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:55:00 GMT

Email deliverability is a big issue for all senders of email – but not nearly as important as it is to those whose transactional messages represent a make or break digital opportunity.

Sendgrid recently announced that it partnered with Pantheon, an all-in-one Drupal platform, to provide developers building sites on Pantheon’s platform the ability to access SendGrid as an integrated offering for the delivery of transactional email.

Transactional email is exceedingly important to both customer acquisition and is a powerful retention tool, but it requires a complex infrastructures which can be costly to build and a real headache to manage.

"Email deliverability can be a concern for developers, costing time, effort and taking resources away from core website development priorities," said Josh Koenig, Pantheon's co-founder and evangelist. "SendGrid's work within the development community is unmatched, with many of today's most trafficked websites and broadly adopted Web applications relying on the service to ensure site or app-triggered emails are reaching users. We're pleased to offer SendGrid as the first email deliverability service within the Pantheon ecosystem."

Drupal Hosting: Pantheon In Focus

Allison Howen — Wed, 01 May 2013 00:34:00 GMT

Obtaining a dramatic spike in traffic is every Web worker’s dream, however, when the website’s hosting provider can’t handle the traffic increase and results in the site crashing, that dream quickly becomes a nightmare.

While one solution to this problem is to change your hosting provider or upsize your virtual private server (VPS), typically both of those alterations require some downtime for the site. Luckily, cloud-based hosting provider Pantheon offers a platform that aims to solve this problem.

Pantheon allows users to build, launch and host Drupal sites. The platform uses one big gridded set of servers to power all of its clients, which range from sites that receive hundreds of page views a month to sites that receive hundreds of millions of page views a month. When a site is run on the Pantheon platform, it automatically uses the company’s Edge Cache, which immediately improves page load times.

“It’s a much more efficient way to serve out a page. (Edge Cache) acts like a CDN,” said Zack Rosen, CEO and co-founder of Pantheon. “It can very efficiently handle a huge amount of traffic at any one time.”

Moreover, when a site is hosted on Pantheon, it is not running on its own siloed server. Instead, the site runs on the same infrastructure that is serving out hundreds of millions of page requests every day for all of the sites on the platform, which means that the site is a “pretty small drop in the bucket” in terms of the service’s overall capacity, according to Rosen.

It is also important to note that Pantheon offers separate development and testing environments to its users, which allows them to try new site features without interfering with their live site. This can help developers eliminate costly mistakes and/or downtime. Additionally, Pantheon allows developers to import and migrate their current sites to the Pantheon platform, supports all versions of Drupal, enables users to manage multiple sites from a single dashboard, allows for one-click Drupal core updates, as well as lets users schedule automatic backups and determine retention periods.

Drupal Commerce Module Hits 10K Milestone

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 22:30:00 GMT

Commerce Guys, an eCommerce company specializing in Drupal, announced that its ecommerce module Drupal Commerce is now in use in over 10,000 websites.

The module was released in August of 2011 and since then it has been adopted by a range of online retailers that sell shippable products, digital content, tickets, and even donations. The module offers a range of capabilities, including the ability to upload catalogs of merchandise, accept payments online, integrate with shipping services and interact with customers.

“Reaching 10,000 is a tremendous benchmark. It means the community and leading e-retailers around the world are increasingly turning to Drupal for more than content management and social publishing,” said Mike O’Connor, co-founder of Commerce Guys. “We created Drupal Commerce with the vision that it would one day become the standard in online commerce. We are excited to be getting closer to that vision with this important milestone.”

Related Reading from Website Magazine:

- Master List of Content Management Systems

- Softaculous Version 4.0 Hits the Shelves

- Drupal-driven Sites Fare Well in New Report

Drupal-driven Sites Fare Well in New Report

Michael Garrity — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 23:00:00 GMT

A new study reports what is being labeled as an "identified trend in corporate website governance", concluding that more high-profile and scalable websites are moving to the Drupal platform.

The study was conducted by Volacci, a search engine marketing company that leverages the Drupal content management system (CMS) technologies for "superior search performance and profitability," in an effort to see which websites are currently built using the Drupal CMS.

Though Drupal typically sees a very small share of the market, with only about 2 percent of all websites currently running on the platform, the company has been seeing more significant increases in the corporate world, with a larger percentage of these websites adopting Drupal's CMS.

In August, the Inc. 5000 was announced, which is a listing of America's fastest growing companies. The number two company on the list, Solazyme, is one of the many sites using the Drupal CMS. Other Drupal sites on the list include Goldline (180), Accuvant (1800) and WellMed Medical Group, all of which saw their positions on the list increase compared to where they were in 2010.

Over the last few years, Drupal has seen a variety of corporate, education and government enterprises, among many other industries, begin to utilize their CMS platform to create their websites. Volacci says that this is an attempt by these companies or organizations to establish "a robust, SEO-friendly presence on the Web."

E-Commerce Modules for Drupal

Allison Howen — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 17:00:00 GMT

There are many different modules available in Drupal that help provide e-commerce solutions for websites.

Below are examples of a few of the best modules to help with the functionality of a Drupal e-commerce site:

Drupal Commerce

Commerce Guys just released a new version of Drupal Commerce— Drupal Commerce 1.0. The new version of the e-commerce platform is compatible with Drupal 7 and features product content management, order management, payment processing, personalization and product search. Other aspects of this module include the ability to create product types with custom attributes, dynamic product displays and the availability of discount pricing rules.

Ubercart

Ubercart focuses on three categories: store configuration, product and catalog creation and order administration. This module has many customizable options and features single page checkout, automatic account generation and simple order creation and editing. Additionally, it has the ability to fully integrate your store with the rest of your site and can be enhanced with other modules and themes. It’s a great solution for stores that sell physical goods, digital product downloads and site memberships.

Amazon Store

The Amazon Store module is desirable for anyone selling through Amazon. After installation and activation, the user must sign up for an Associate ID— in order to receive commissions based on purchases made through your store. This module allows for searching, provides product pages and manages a shopping cart.

MailChimp Expands Drupal Integration

Linc Wonham — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 20:00:00 GMT

MailChimp has announced a new integration with the Drupal content management system that brings MailChimp’s feature set directly into the Drupal user interface. Drupal users can also now send emails using MailChimp’s Simple Transactional Solution (STS).

After install, there’s a MailChimp API key input, and the integration is ready to go. It supports an unlimited amount of mailing lists, anonymous user signup, increased subscription options (such as signup during site registration) and support for MailChimp’s STS that allows for sending and tracking email via Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) within Drupal.

MailChimp STS overlays MailChimp’s tracking and interface on Amazon’s SES, so users can benefit from Amazon’s reliable delivery and massive scale, all channeled through MailChimp’s interface. The front end is all MailChimp, the back end is a lot of Amazon, and users can do it all within Drupal.

The plugin also features a complete user interface overhaul that unclutters workspace and makes it easier to work with individual lists while managing the newly expanded list support. This module will continue to expand its features per user feedback, and complements the array of features offered by Drupal.

Drupal is a completely customizable and scalable CMS solution that stresses its constantly growing list of plugins and modules. The MailChimp platform provides email marketing and publishing features that are affordable enough for small businesses and powerful enough for larger companies.

Translate Content Inside Drupal with Lingotek

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 05 May 2011 01:45:00 GMT

If you're a Drupal user looking to enter new markets abroad, you'll need to address translation if you hope to increase engagement internationally.

Collaborative translation solution Lingotek just announced a partnership with Acquia which provides commercial products and services to users of the open source Drupal publishing platform.

Lingotek and Acquia will offer Lingotek's Collaborative Translation Software to the Drupal community. Lingotek can now be embedded directly in Drupal through a set of APIs, providing its community members access to unlimited language translations through Lingotek's professional, community or machine translators.

"Internationalization and localization have long been priorities for the Drupal community," said Dries Buytaert, Acquia co-founder and CTO, Drupal project founder and lead. "Lingotek's translation technology helps Drupal site owners deliver multi-lingual site experiences and engage members of a Drupal community site to participate in the translation effort."

10 Essential Drupal Modules for Higher Earnings

Linc Wonham — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 20:00:00 GMT

WordPress, WordPress, WordPress – all anyone talks about anymore is WordPress.

A recent comparison of the top CMS/blogging platforms found that WordPress is growing at a significantly higher rate than competitors Joomla and Drupal. However, upon closer inspection of the data, it is apparent that Drupal ranks first in one very important category – earnings. At least among freelance and work-at-home Web professionals.

The State of the Work-from-Home and Freelancing Economy Report was conducted by job search engine DoNanza, and the key finding was this: While more professionals are using WordPress, professionals using Drupal are earning more.

In short, the average project for a Drupal user earned twice the amount of a WordPress project. Joomla, incidentally, was slightly higher than WordPress, but an average project still earned about half that of a Drupal project.

More people are turning to WordPress to accomplish their, let’s say, simpler Web business goals. But when a more flexible infrastructure with advanced features is required, Drupal fills that need more effectively.

Much of that flexibility and functionality within the Drupal platform comes from modules, essentially the same thing as WordPress plugins or Joomla extensions. Below are 10 Drupal modules that can launch your web enterprise to higher earnings:

• SEO Checklist – A must-have for Drupal users, this module optimizes your site for the major search engines by tracking the modules you have already installed and telling you what areas still require attention. Once you have tended to the unchecked items on the list, your site will perform better on Google, Yahoo, Bing and the rest.

• Content Optimizer – This module also helps to increase search rankings by improving on-page optimization factors. An SEO analyzer provides instant analysis of your site’s content, displaying key statistics about the content and offering recommendations for methods of improvement.

• Content Analysis – This is actually an API designed to help modules designed for analyzing your site’s content. The module enables a suite of analyzers such as Quick SEO, Scribe SEO, Readability, W3C Analyzer and Keyword Research.

• AdSense – A great tool for maximizing your revenues through Google’s Adsense, this module helps Web content providers manage the process with extreme efficiency. Site owners are protected from displaying more than the maximum amount of ads allowed by Google, can display search results on their sites, can easily use ad blocks and disable ads for certain roles, and the AdSense module is also the best tool for ad revenue sharing.

• Google Ad Manager – Allows you to easily configure DoubleClick for Publisher ad slots for Drupal. Each defined ad slot becomes a block that can be added to a region.

• Ubercart – This is the doorway to Drupal’s entire suite of e-commerce functionalities, which include coupons, product tools, payment systems and much more. Ubercart is a highly effective solution for users that want to sell physical goods, digital downloads and site memberships, and each module focuses on three key areas: store configuration, product and catalog creation and order management.

• Administration Menu – An excellent tool for new Drupal users coming from other CMS providers, as well as a must-have module for site builders and administrators. It renders all administrative items in a clean, CSS-based menu at the top of your website, and contains local tasks as well as regular menu items.

• Views – This module can be used to generate reports, create summaries and display collections of images and other content. Views provides a flexible method for Drupal users to control how lists and tables of contents are presented on your site. Given enough information, the tool can build a query, execute it and display the results.

• Contemplate – This module was built to fill an aesthetic need within Drupal’s Content Construction Kit (CCK), adding a Template tab to editing pages and making it easier to rearrange fields, remove headers and anything else to make your content look better. The Contemplate module can also be used to add files, images and any other media to RSS feeds as attachments.

• Link to Us – This module allows users to create a page of banners that can be used by other sites to link to your own. Visitors, contributors and partners can all use consistent banners that link back to your Drupal site, and the links are all SEO friendly with titles and alternate text.

There are many more modules available for Drupal, each of them designed to help Web professionals excel in their specific categories. Visit the site for more information about the latest and most popular Drupal modules, and how they can lift earnings for your Web business.

CMS Apps for Small Biz at Network Solutions

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:44:00 GMT

Network Solutions has added several content management systems applications to its product suite including WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, and Mambo.

"We want to make it as easy as possible for our customers to publish their content online," said Kamalesh Dwivedi, Chief Information Officer for Network Solutions. "These scalable and innovatively integrated content management system applications launched from our Network Solutions Oriented Architecture (NSOA) help our customers by giving them powerful ways to publish, manage and organize a variety of content on their websites with the ease of use our customers expect."

Most web hosting companies offer some form of content management system within their service packages. If you're in the market for a new web host, analyzing which solutions are available before signing a long-term contract is imperative.

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Five Awesome (Free) Drupal Themes

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:18:00 GMT

One of the most popular CMS systems in Drupal doesn't usually get the attention it deserves - at least here at Website Magazine. Choosing between open-source and commercial platforms is a difficult decision (as we address in relation to e-commerce systems in our April special issue) and requires serious consideration. That being said, Drupal is the choice of many Web professionals for good reason: it's as stable as it gets and extensible to the point of envy for other providers, thanks to some terrific modules.

In my ten-year history as a Web pro, I've only used Drupal in one other installation. A micro-project I'm working on, however, required a CMS, and instead of trying to hack up WordPress to act like a CMS, I thought I would just give Drupal another go, as the community has seen a lot of development since the last time I had the opportunity.

I tested about ten themes from the last night for the website project and finally settled on one (Acquia Marina) but others would have done an equally nice job in presenting the content. I was surprised at the number of themes that were simply reworked Wordpress themes ported to Drupal (some of which are listed below). There are several Drupal-only themes in the list as well.

	A3 Atlantis - Modern Drupal theme designed by Blamcast. Features nice typography, small files sizes and smart columns for adjusting between 1, 2 or 3 columns. Fully XHTML compliant and CSS Level 3 compliant.
	Acquia Marina - Solid theme by TopNotchThemes in partnership with Acquia. Features 15 collapsible block regions, drop-down links menu, includes icons for core and Views blocks. Cross-browser tested in IE6/7, Opera, Safari, and Firefox.
	Amity Island - A fresh Drupal theme (the first under the GPL license from ThemeShark). Features a tableless design, eight additional and fully collapsible regions and one level of suckerfish dropdowns.
	AppleWeb - This tableless, W3C compliant layout by TemplateWorld (Drupal theme by Neerja Software) has been tested for CSS 2.1 and is XHTML 1.0 Strict. Works with IE7, Firefox, Safari and even Chrome.
	Color Papper - A Drupal theme originally created by DreamTemplate for WP. The attractive design comes with a fixed-width layout with two columns, is CSS based (level 2.1) and validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict.

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Open Source Drupal CMS Gets a Nod

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:31:00 GMT

If you're in the market for a content management system (and an open-source one to boot), you might be interested to know that the Packt's Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award (very prestigious in CMS circle) was given to Drupal in the overall category, collecting a first prize of $5,000.

Drupal finished ahead of Joomla! and DotNetNuke. The open-source platform has grown substantially by all accounts of late, downloaded almost 1.5 million times in the last 12 months. It is currently being applied by companies such as Warner Brothers Music, MTV UK, and the New York Observer amongst others.

Finishing in second place and receiving $3,000 was Joomla!, the youngest of the three finalists and a previous winner of the Overall Award. Judges were impressed with Joomla's ease of installation and ability to get a website up-and-running in a short space of time. Particular praise was reserved for its sizeable and enthusiastic community, which has allowed the project to grow so quickly in such a short space of time. In third place and receiving $2,000 was DotNetNuke, the only CMS in the final that is written in VB.NET for the ASP.NET framework. DotNetNuke received positive feedback from judges who were impressed with its ease of development and security implementation features.

The most promising CMS system was SilverStripe. SilverStripe is today exclusively revealed as the winner of the 2008 Most Promising Open Source Content Management System. The SilverStripe project received $2,000, holding off strong competition from CMS Made Simple in the first runner up position with ImpressCMS and MiaCMS finishing joint second runner up.

Fantastico Gets An Update

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:08:00 GMT

The latest version of Fantastico (2.10.4 r22) has been released. The updates (listed below) may not be available for your specific web host yet, but check back over the next few days as Web servers update their Fantastico scripts at different times. This version of Fantastico includes the following updates:

Drupal: 6.4 -> 6.6
Gallery: 2.2.6 -> 2.3
SMF: 1.1.5 -> 1.1.6
Soholaunch Pro Edition: 4.9.3 r14 -> 4.9.3 r17
TikiWiki: 2.1 -> 2.2
WordPress: 2.6.2 -> 2.6.3

Drupal 6.0 Released

Administrator — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 17:35:00 GMT

The Drupal project announced the official release of Drupal 6, the latest version of its award-winning open source content management platform. The new release features many improvements in workflow and usability, has integrated AJAX and multilingual support, adopted the OpenID authentication standard and increased the flexibility in creating custom themes. Check out the entire list of new feature and modules as well as the changes made to performance and maintenance at Drupal.

"The core idea behind Drupal is go give everyone the power to create compelling community-driven web sites without sacrificing power," said Dries Buytaert, Drupal project lead and chief technology officer of Acquia, Inc. "Drupal 6 is true to this heritage, offering the best-ever performance, functional power, and polish. I can't wait to see what the global Drupal community does with it."