techcafeteria

Okay, I like to brag that I can blog from my Nexus One, but, until today, I’ve never done it. What’s different? I installed a beta version of Swype, an alternate keyboard that lets you type by dragging your finger from letter to letter on the keyboard instead of pressing on the keys. The software is very good at guessing what you mean, so you can move pretty quickly and still be reasonably accurate. It’s somewhat amazing, and a godsend for people like me who are used to having physical keyboards on our phones.

To join the Android beta, sign up here.

I’ve only had this installed for a few hours, and I’m already faster than I was with the standard keyboard. Swype boasts that trained users can hit 50 words per minute. When I get there, I might have to give up the laptop altogether.

[Oops! Forgot to publish this Idealware post from late January…]

Here are a few updates topics I’ve posted on in the last few months:

Nonprofit Assessment

The announcement that GuideStar, Charity Navigator and others would be moving away from the 990 form as their primary source for assessing nonprofit performance raised a lot of interesting questions, such as “How will assessments of outcomes be standardized in a way that is not too subjective?” and “What will be required of nonprofits in order to make those assessments?” We’ll have a chance to get some preliminary answers to those questions on February 4th, when NTEN will sponsor a phone-in panel discussion with representatives of GuideStar and Charity Navigator, as well as members of the nonprofit community. The panel will be hosted by Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy, and will include:

• Bob Ottenhoff of Guidestar


• Ken Berger of Charity Navigator


• Lucy Bernholtz of Blueprint R & D


• Christine Egger of Social Actions


• David Geilhufe of NetSuite


• and host Holly Ross of NTEN.

I’ll be participating as well. You can learn more and register for the free event with NTEN.

The Half-Life of Internet Explorer 6

It’s been quite a few weeks as far as headlines go, with a humanitarian crisis in haiti; a dramatic election in Massachusetts; A trial to determine if California gay marriage-banning proposition is, in fact, discriminatory; high profile shakeups in late night television and word of the Snuggie, version 2 all competing for our attention. An additional, fascinating story is unfolding with Google’s announcement that they might pull their business out of China in light of a massive cybercrime against critics of the Chinese regime that, from all appearances, was either performed or sanctioned by the Chinese government. There’s been a lot of speculation about Google’s motives for such a dramatic move, and I fall in the camp that says, whatever their motives, it’s refreshing to see a gigantic U.S. corporation factor ethics into a business decision, even if it’s unclear exactly what the complete motivations are.

As my colleague Steve Backman fully explains here, here’s been some fallout from this story for Microsoft. First, like Google and Yahoo!, Microsoft operates a search engine in China and submits to the Chinese governments censoring filters. They’ve kept mum on their feelings about the cyber-attack. Google’s analysis of that attack reveals that GMail accounts were hacked and other breaches occurred via security holes in Internet Explorer, versions six and up, that allow a hacker to upload programs and take control of a user’s PC. As this information came to light, France and Germany both issued advisories to their citizens that switching to a browser other than Internet Explorer would be prudent. In response, Microsoft has issued a statement recommending that everyone upgrade from Internet Explorer version 6 to version 8, the current release. What Microsoft doesn’t mention is that the security flaw exists in versions seven and eight as well as six, so upgrading won’t protect you from the threat, although they just released a patch that hopefully will.

So, while their reasoning is suspect, it’s nice to see that Microsoft has finally joined the campaign to remove this old, insecure and incompatible with web standards browser.

Google Wave: Still Waters

I have kept Google Wave open in a tab in my browser since the day my account was opened, subscribed to about 15 waves, some of them quite well populated. I haven’t seen an update to any of these waves since January 12th, and it was really only one wave that’s gotten any updates at all in the past month. I can’t give away the invites I have to offer. The conclusion I’m drawing is that, if Google doesn’t do something to make the Wave experience more compelling, it’s going to go the way of a Simply Red B-Side and fade from memory. As I’ve said, there is real potential here for something that puts telecommunication, document creation and data mining on a converged platform, and that would be new. But, in it’s current state, it’s a difficult to use substitute for a sophisticated Wiki. And, while Google was hyping this, Confluence released a new version of their excellent (free for nonprofits) enterprise Wiki that can incorporate (like Wave) Google gadgets. That makes me want to pack up my surfboard.

Google unveiled a bold new product last week; one of critical and compelling import to anyone who believes that their online reputation is important.  I’m not talking about Google Buzz.  I’m talking about Google Profiles.  This isn’t a new service—Google introduced the profile pages a few years ago.  But the release of Google Buzz has illuminated how important they are in Google’s plans, and how important they can be for us.  And if this profile is now a major component in my personal branding strategy, I demand better tools to manage it than Google has provided.

About a year ago, Google pointed out that, if you have a populated Google Profile, they will include it below the search results when people google your name. So, for someone like me—who does want to be easily located on the web, but has a reasonably common name, this seemed like a good deal, and I filled out my profile.  As a result, I’m prominently placed in the profile links when you search for my name, even though I’m about the fifth best known “Peter Campbell” on the web.

A Google Profile page contains four important pieces:

• Biographical information about you.


• Links to your important web sites.


• Secured contact information.


• Google Buzz integration.

The bio and links are much like other online profiles, such as Yahoo! and Facebook.  The contact info option is interesting, as you can share it with groups defined in your Google Contacts.  I can’t see a good reason to do this, as any group I’d be willing to share with (such as “family”) already knows how to find me and, if they don’t, they aren’t going to think to look at my Google Profile(!). So I’ve left this blank, as it seems like better security to not publish my address and phone number online if I don’t have a good reason to.

The Buzz integration is particularly worrisome.  First, by default, Buzz publishes your connections to your profile.  It’s easy to turn off, and recommended if you have any concern about anyone in the world knowing who your online friends are.  I turned this right off.

Second, your Buzz stream is published to the profile as well. So consider that—anything you say on Buzz gets added to your profile, which might be prominently placed in search results for your name (whereas your buzzes might not be).  We all know that employers are getting savvy, and searching the web for info about us as part of a candidate review.  But I assume that an employer seeing my Twitter stream on Twitter will bear in mind the context—Twitter, like Buzz, is a conversational medium.  A profile is much more like a resume.  I may well buzz about my favorite Doctor Who episode, but I’m not going to discuss TV shows on my resume…

The furor over Buzz’s privacy violations at rollout were really much more about the profiles—many new Buzz users didn’t even know they had  a Google Profile prior.

So, Google—I hope you’re listening.  If my Google Profile is going to factor more and more into my online identity—and the way that Buzz both highlights it and depends on it suggests so—you need to give me more tools and flexibility about how that profile looks and what information it contains.  Here’s what would make me feel like I have a profile on the web, as opposed to Google having a dossier on me on the web:

• Less structured content.  The “what can’t you find on Google” question is cute, but it’s not a key component of my personal branding.  Get rid of the cute stuff, and give me more options to share the info that I want to share, not that you necessarily want to hear.


• A logo, stylesheet, and other basic web design tools.  I’d like this to look more like this blog, with the black background and the Techcafeteria logo.


• My own tabs, and the ability to remove the extra tabs that you think I should have.  Mostly, the decision to publish my Buzz feed to my profile should be mine, not yours.  Make that optional, but add the ability to add new tabs and link them to other websites or RSS sources.

For an example, look at my home site at http://techcafeteria.com.  That is a profile, with info about me; lifestreaming; shared resources via RSS; and a contact form.  If Google Profiles could do what I ask, I’d scrap the current Techcafeteria site and link this blog, along with my other feeds, directly to my Google Profile, and redirect both techcafeteria.com and peterscampbell.com to it.

Until then, that’s not my profile.  That’s Google’s profile of me, and it’s a bit creepy.

Two weeks ago, I bit an expensive bullet and bought a new Nexus One phone, directly from Google. I’m a T-Mobile customer, and, as long-time readers know, an early adopter of the T-Mobile G1, the first publicly-available Android phone. I went for the unlocked version of the Nexus One (at $529 before taxes) rather than the $279 upgrade. My analysis of what the cost would have been, under the arcane T-Mobile condition that I can’t get a Nexus One and maintain my family plan at that price, was that it would have cost hundreds more over the two year contract term.

Here’s the short review: Fast, fast, fast, fast and shiny!

Here’s the long one:

My critique of the G1 has always been that it is mediocre hardware sporting an awesome operating system. I love Android; I loved it before there were any decent apps available. Maybe it’s because I appreciate a mobile OS that acts like a desktop OS when it makes sense to and doesn’t when it doesn’t, which is about the opposite of Windows Mobile with it’s “start menu” and “Program Manager” metaphors carried over from the PC and the incessant pop-ups interrupting whatever you’re trying to do. Android is like a computer OS in it that it is highly configurable, whereas every other mobile OS is tightly structured.  Android features unobtrusive notifications and a cloud-based approach to managing the phone’s data that makes it far simpler to deal with than something that requires Activesync or iTunes.

The Nexus one erases almost all of my G1 hardware peeves, with one big exception: it has no physical keyboard. That I miss, and I would gladly add an eighth of an inch to the thickness in order to have one. But, that said, the soft keyboard is much better than earlier Android soft keyboards and it’s not stopping me from using the phone. Another saving grace is that the Nexus supports voice input (as well as voice searching and dialing), so I can input an email by speaking into the phone, clean it up a bit, and send, rather than type the whole thing. The voice dictation isn’t perfect, but it’s really not bad.

The battery lasts exactly a day for me. That’s with GPS and Bluetooth turned off unless I have need for them, and average use. It’s about half a day less than I had after I impregnated my G1 with a fat replacement from Seidio. Seidio has one for the Nexus One, too, but I’m not willing to fatten it up for it, as opposed to just keeping a sync cable handy.

So that’s the bad news: no keyboard and a battery that’s as good as the iPhone’s. Everything else is awesome!

The 1Ghz Snapdragon processor—the fastest in any phone on the market today—just pops. The only time I ever see any churning is on occasional loads of the Android Market, and I know that those are on the server’s end. Email, games, maps, and most web pages are so snappy I have to blink and wonder if I’m really on a mobile phone. The snapdragon also features 512MB RAM and 512MB flash storage, which is worlds more than the G1. One of the liberating things is the ability to install and try out apps without having to first scrutinize what I have installed and remove a thing or two, another killer flaw for the G1.

The 3.7” 480×800 resolution screen is beautiful. Unless you have a Verizon Droid, which is the same size with slightly higher resolution, you’ve never seen a screen this nice. Along with the multi-touch (added to my phone in an update that arrived on the same day that I got the phone), you can really read web pages and view photos. And the camera—500 megapixel; flash; auto-adjusting. I finally have a better camera phone than my wife, who has the excellent Blackberry Curve 8900.

The phone itself sports two microphones, one that captures voice and background noise, and another that catches only the background noise and filters it out of the broadcast. this makes the Nexus One a very clear phone. This is big for me, because in my cubicle culture workplace, I often duck into the noisy server room in order to have conversations with my wife and kid.

I use all five home screens on the phone, with icons, folders and widgets. A handy included widget let me toggle the wifi, GPS, bluetooth, etc. I may ditch the ubiquitous Google search box widget because one of the four buttons on the phone pops it up. I’ll probably remove the pretty live wallpaper that shows autumn leaves falling behinds the icons in order to preserve a little more battery, but it has too much of a show-off factor right now to disable.

I’m appreciating a couple of apps that I never bothered to try on my stuffed G1. Seesmic’s twitter client is faster, stabler and better than Twidroid. There, I said it. I stood by Twidroid for over a year, but Seesmic includes bit.ly links in it’s free version (there is no paid one yet) and just seems to be more logically laid out. GDocs has replaced my beloved Wikinotes. I’m losing the Wiki, but I now have a notepad that integrates with my Google Docs account, allowing me to sync notes I write to the web and edit them in either place. That’s very cool.

I had MyBackupPro on the G1, and it lived up to it’s claims, restoring all of my Android preferences when I first set up the phone. And Bluetooth File Transfer and PDANet both seem to do what they claim, allowing me to transfer files to and from my Mac when a sync cable isn’t handy; and to use my phone as a 3G modem if I’m stuck without WiFi available for my Mac.

One issue I’m experiencing is that the phone won’t accept subbing in Google Voice as my voicemail carrier, but this might be because I have yet to make it down to T-Mobile and tell them that I’ve made this swap. I anticipate that they’ll tell me that i have to pay $5 more a month for their “Android plan”, which is somehow different from the “G1 plan”, but I also need to drop a monthly $5 equipment insurance fee that I doubt they’ll honor on a phone that they didn’t sell me.

I downloaded the Wordpress app as well, but I’m cheating and typing this post on my computer. Next one, I’ll dictate into the phone.

There have been widespread reports of 3G connectivity problems with Nexus Ones. I’m crossing my fingers as I type, but I haven’t seen any of them.

My friends with iPhones still all believe that they’re better off because they have 50 million apps to choose from. And a phone that’s half as fast, with a smaller screen at half the resolution, a lousy camera, an operating system that they can’t customize, AT&T 3G, poor call quality and no ability to multitask. They have full iPods, yes, and I considered that significant for some time, but now that there’s Doubletwist, which can sync your own—or your iTunes—playlists to an Android phone, that’s not so big an advantage.

I’m confidant that the Nexus One is the best smartphone, period—I can’t recommend it enough. Android has come of age.

...or you might. I find that, in a 25 year IT career that has always included a percentage of tech support, human nature is to use the features of an application that we know about, and only go looking for new features when a clearly defined need for one arises. In that scenario, some great functionality might be hiding in plain sight. Here are a few of my favorite “not very well-hidden” secrets. Share yours in the comments.

Google Search Filtering

Have you ever clicked the “Show Options” link on your results page? Do a search for whatever interests you and try it (it’s located right under the Google logo). This will add a left navigation bar with some very useful filtering options. Of note, you can narrow to a trendy real-time search buy clicking on “Latest” under “Any Time”; choose a date range,filter out the pages that you’ve seen, or haven’t seen yet – how useful is that for finding that page that you googled last week but didn’t save? The funny thing is that Google has an “Advanced Search” screen, which, of course, can do many things that this bar can’t (such as searching for public domain media).

Microsoft Outlook Shortcuts

If you use Outlook, you know how simple it is to find your mail and calendar. Other common folders are conveniently placed in your default view. But if you’re the slightest bit of a power user, or you work in an environment where users share mailbox folders or use Exchange’s Public Folders, than keeping track of all of those folders can get a bit tedious. That’s what the Shortcut view is for. Buried below the Mail, Calendar and Task buttons, you can move it up to the visible button list by right-clicking on the bar area (in the lower-left hand corner of Outlook 2003 or 2007’s screen) and choosing “Navigation Pane Options”. Highlight “Shortcuts” and then click “Move up” enough times to get it in one of the first four positions. Click OK, then click on the “Shortcuts” bar. From here, you can add new shortcuts and, optionally, arrange them in shortcut groups. You can rename the shortcuts with more meaningful titles, so that, if, say, you’re monitoring a norther user’s inbox, you can give it their name instead of having two folders named “Inbox”. One tip: to add shortcuts to a group, right-click on the group title and add from there.

Facebook Friend Lists

Nothing makes Facebook more manageable than Friends Lists, and, with the new security changes, this is more true than ever. If you’re like me, your connections on Facebook span every facet of your life, from family to childhood friends to co-workers. Wouldn’t it be useful to be able to send links and messages to all of your co-workers but not your friends, or vice-versa? Click on “Friends” from the Facebook menu, then all connections. If you’ve become a fan of a page or two, you’ll see that Facebook has already created two lists for you: Friends and Pages. To make more, scroll through your connection list and click to “Add to List” option to the right. You can create new lists from there, and add friends to multiple lists.

When you share a link, note, video or whatever, you can choose which list to send it to by clicking on the lock icon next to the “Share” button and choosing “Customize”.

There Are More

Did you know about these features? Are there other ones that you use that make your use of popular applications and web sites much more manageable? Leave a comment and let us know.

The traditional project planning method starts with a Project Manager, who plays a role that fluctuates between implementation guru, data entry clerk and your nagging Mom when you’re late for school.  The PM, as we’ll call her or him, gathers all of the projected dates, people, budget, and materials, then builds the house of cards that we call the plan.  The plan will detail how the HR Director will spend 15% of her time on a series of scheduled tasks that, if they slip, will impact the Marketing Coordinator and the Database Manager’s tasks and timelines.  So the PM has to be able to quickly, intelligently, rewrite the plan when the HR Director is pulled away for a personnel matter, skewering those assumptions.

My take is that this methodology doesn’t work in environments like ours, where reduced overhead, high turnover and unanticipated priorities are the norm.  We need a less granular methodology; one that will bend easily with our flexible work conditions.  Mind you, when you give up the detailed plan, you give up the certainty that every “i” will be dotted, every “t” crossed, and every outcome accomplished on schedule.  But it’s possible to still keep sight of the important things while sacrificing some of the structural integrity.

First, keep what is critical: clear goals, communication, engagement and feedback.  The biggest risk in any project no matter how well planned, is that you’ll end up with something that has little relation to what you were trying to get.  You need clearly understood goals, shared by all internal and external parties. Each step taken must factor in those goals and be made in light of them.  All parties who have a stake in the project should have a role and a voice in the plan, from the CEO to the data entry clerk.  And everyone’s opinion matters.

Read up on agile project management, a collaborative approach that is more focused on the outcomes than  the steps and timeline to get there.  Offload the project management by focusing on expectation management.  The clearer the participants are about their roles and accountability for their contributions, the less they need to be managed.  Take a look at the Cult of Done (their manifesto is at the top of this article).  Sound insane? Maybe.  More insane than spending thousands of dollars and hours on an over-planned project that never yields results? For some perspective, read The Mythical Man Month (or, at least, this Wikipedia article on it), a book that clearly illustrates how the best laid plans can go horribly wrong.

Finally, my advocacy for less stringent forms of project management should not be read as permission to do it haphazardly.  Engagement in and attention to the project can’t be minimized.  I’m suggesting that we can take a more creative, less traditional approach in environments where the traditional approach might be a bad fit, and for projects that don’t require it.  There are a lot of judgment calls involved, and the real challenge, as always, is keeping your eye on the goals and the team accountable for delivering them.

A few months ago, I blogged a bit about Google Wave, and how it might live up to the hype of being the successor to email.  Now that I’ve had a month or so to play with it, I wanted to share my initial reactions.  Short story: Google Wave is an odd duck, that takes getting used to. As it is today, it is not that revolutionary—in fact, it’s kind of redundant. The jury is still out.

Awkwardness

To put Wave in perspective, I clearly remember my first exposure to email.  I bought my first computer in 1987: a Compaq “portable”. The thing weighed about 60 pounds, sported a tiny green on black screen, and had two 5 and 1/4 inch floppy drives for applications and storage).  Along with the PC, I got a 1200 BPS modem, which allowed me o dial up local bulletin boards.  And, as I poked around, I discovered the 1987 version of email: the line editor.

On those early BBSes, emails were sent by typing one line (80 characters, max) of text and hitting “enter”.  Once “enter” was pressed, that line was sent to the BBS.  No correcting typos, no rewriting the sentence.  It was a lot like early typewriters, before they added the ability to strike out previously submitted text.

But, regardless of the primitive editing capabilities, email was a revelation.  It was a new medium; a form of communication that, while far more awkward than telephone communications, was much more immediate than postal mail.  And it wasn’t long before more sophisticated interfaces and editors made their way to the bulletin boards.

Google Wave is also, at this point, awkward. To use it, you have to be somewhat self-confident right from the start, as others are potentially watching every letter that you type.  And while it’s clear that the ability to co-edit and converse about a document in the same place is powerful, it’s messy.  Even if you get over the sprawling nature of the conversations, which are only minimally better than  what you would get with ten to twenty-five people all conversing in one Word document, the lack of navigational tools within each wave is a real weakness.

Redundant?

I’m particularly aware of these faults because I just installed and began using Confluence, a sophisticated, enterprise Wiki (free for nonprofits) at my organization. While we’ve been told that Wave is the successor to email, Google Docs and, possibly, Sharepoint, I have to say that Confluence does pretty much all of those things and is far more capable.  All wikis, at their heart, offer collaborative editing, but the good ones also allow for conversations, plug-ins and automation, just as Google Wave promises.  But with a wiki, the canvas is large enough and the tools are there to organize and manage the work and conversation.  With Wave, it’s awfully cramped, and somewhat primitive in comparison.

Too early to tell?

Of course, we’re looking at a preview.  The two things that possibly differentiate Wave from a solid wiki are the “inbox” metaphor and the automation capabilities. Waves can come to you, like email, and anyone who has tried to move a group from an email list to a web forum knows how powerful that can be. And Wave’s real potential is in how the “bots”, server-side components that can interact with the people communicating and collaborating, will integrate the development and conversation with existing data sources.  It’s still hard to see all of that in this nascent stage.  Until then, it’s a bit chicken and egg.

Wave starting points

There are lots of good Wave resources popping up, but the best, hands down, is Gina Trapini’s Complete Guide, available online for free and in book form soon. Gina’s blog is a must read for people who find the types of things I write about interesting.

Once you’re on wave, you’ll want to find Waves to join, and exactly how you do that is anything but obvious.  the trick is to search for a term “such as “nonprofit” or “fundraising” and add the phrase “with:public”. A good nonprofit wave to start with is titled, appropriately, “The Nonprofit Technology Wave”.

If you haven’t gotten a Wave invite and want to, now is the time to query your Twitter and Facebook friends, because invites are being offered and we’ve passed the initial “gimme” stage.  In fact, I have ten or more to share (I’m peterscampbell on most social networks and at Google’s email service).

Here’s the third in a series of posts on getting started with Drupal, the popular open source content management system. The short intro and discussion on modules are best read first. Today we’ll look at site structure, and how menus, blocks and taxonomies can make your site navigable for your visitors.

Menus

Drupal has a simple and flexible tool for creating and managing menus. You can check/uncheck standard functions; assign them to regions (left sidebar, right sidebar, header, footer, etc.); and easily create new items.

By default, Drupal offers three menus that you can add to your site:

	Navigation – The main menu is dynamic. It displays items based on the visitor’s role and state of authentication. For example, an unauthenticated user might see a “Login” menu item, while an authenticated user would see “logout”. An authenticated user who is also a site manager would see the Administer menu. This menu is usually placed in a sidebar, next to the main content
	Primary Links – This is often the menu for the main content areas, e.g. Home, Blog, Calendar, About. Primarily links are usually placed in a site’s header.
	Secondary Links can be used for less popular pages, but ones that you want to have available, such as site maps, privacy notices, and contact links.

You can assign a menu item to any particular piece of content, or to a collection of items by content type. Drupal assigns numbers to individual items. The basic content type is called a node, so the default first page of a web site would be at http://your-site.org/node/1. If you create a blog, the first post would be at http://your-site.org/blog/1.

Say you wanted blog/1 to be your front page, but you also wanted something easier to remember to appear in the address bar, you could rename it “home”, so that people could browse directly to the site at http://your-site.org/home. They would see, in the center of the home page, that first blog entry. Drupal’s general settings allow you to identify your home page; renaming a numeric page simply makes it friendlier for your users.

If, instead, you simply wanted the whole blog to be the home page, then you would skip the numbers, and not bother with a rename, as linking the front page to http://your-site.org/blog would accomplish that.

Drupal’s real power comes in when you realize that, with the CCK module, you can make your own content types, and that can be very easy. A press release will have a similar format to a blog item (title, content). So you can create a type called press_release and link a page to it: http://your-site.org/press_release. All new press releases that you post to the site from Create Content/Press Release will appear there.

Blocks

Blocks are boxes that can be placed on one or more pages or associated with one or more content types. They usually appear in the left or right sidebars. Strategically associating blocks with particular content can be a subtler way o offer navigational aids. For example, you might want to have a block with current open positions appear on your “About” page, but not necessarily with your blog. Or you might not want the job listings to appear on pages describing your services, instead featuring a “Donate Now” box. This flexibility allows you to align content in ways that make sense for the different audiences with varying interests that your site will attract.

Taxonomies

All of the above is fine for sites without a lot of content. But, once you have a library of blog entries, press releases and documents to share, you’ll want to give your visitors a way to find what they’re looking for that doesn’t involve inordinate amounts of scrolling. Search is a no-brainer, but even more important is to organize your content with meaningful labels. For this, use the Taxonomy module.

Taxonomies allow you to tag or classify your content using hierarchal terminology. For example, if your NPO serves the homeless, you might have papers on poverty and employment, descriptions of available shelters and programs, job opportunities, and much more. You can break this content down into meaningful categories, then assign sub-terms in each category. Once the taxonomy is in place, you can assign menu items to terms in your taxonomy, thus aggregating all of the relevant content on a single page. You can set up menu blocks for the sub-terms and assign each block to it’s category page. The result is a content rich, drill down web site.

That’s it for navigation. Next week, we’ll talk about Themes and ways you can make your Drupal site distinctive.

I’ve been doing a lot of work with the open source content management system Drupal lately, and thought I’d share some thoughts on how to get a new site up and running. Drupal, you might recall, got high ratings in Idealware’s March ‘09 report comparing open source content management systems. Despite it’s popularity, there are some detractors who make good points, but I find Drupal to be flexible, powerful and customizable enough to meet a lot of my web development needs.

While you can put together a very sophisticated online community and/or website with it, you can also use it for pretty simple things. For example, the nptech aggregator at nptech,info uses Drupal’s excellent RSS aggregation functions extensively, and not much else. No blog, no forums. But, having installed and tried standalone RSS aggregators like Gregarius, it became clear that Drupal was just as good an aggregator and, if desired, much, much more. Similarly, when co-workers were looking for a site to share documents with optional commenting (to replace an FTP repository), Drupal was a good choice to support a simple task without locking out growth possibilities.

Installation

Installing Drupal can be a three click process or a unix command line nightmare, depending on your circumstances. These days, there are simple options. If you are using a web host, check to see if your site management console is the popular CPanel, and, if so, if it includes the Fantastico utility. Fantastico offers automated installs for many popular open source CMSes, blogs and utilities.

Absent Fantastico, your host might have something similar, or you can download the Drupal source and follow the instructions. Required skills include the ability to modify text files, change file and folder permissions, and create a MySQL database. At a minimum, FTP access to your server, or a good, web-based file manager, will be required.

If you’re installing on your own server, things to be aware of are that you’ll need to have PHP, MySQL and a decent web server, such as Apache installed (these are generally installed by default on Linux, but not on Windows). If you use Linux, consumer-focused Linux variants like Ubuntu and Fedora will have current versions of these applications, properly configured. More robust Linux distributions, like Redhat Enterprise, sometimes suffer from their cautious approach by including software versions that are obsolete. I’m a big fan of Centos, the free version of Red Hat Enterprise, but I’m frustrated that it comes with an older, insecure version of PHP and only very annoying ways to remedy that.

Up and Running

Once installed, Drupal advises you to configure and customize your web site. There are some key decisions to be made, and the success of the configuration process will be better assured if you have a solid idea as to what your web site is going to be used for. With that clearly defined, you can configure the functionality, metadata, site structure, and look and feel of your web site.

1. Install and enable Modules. Which of the core modules (the ones included in the Drupal pacckage) need to be enabled, and what additional modules are required in order to build your site? This is the first place I go.
2. Define the site Taxonomy. While you can build a site without a taxonomy, you should only do so for a simple site. A well structured taxonomy helps you make your site navigable; enhances searching; and provides a great tool for pyramid-style content management, with broad topics on one level and the ability to refine and dig deeper intuitively built into the site.
3. Structure your site with Blocks. You can define blocks, assign them to regions on a page (such as the sidebars or header) and restrict them to certain pages. On the theory that a good web site navigates the user through the site intelligently, based on what they click, the ability to dynamically highlight different content on different pages is one of Drupal’s real strengths.
4. Theme your web site. Don’t settle for the default themes—there are hundreds (or thousands) to choose from. Go to Drupal Theme Garden and find one that meets your needs, then tweak it. You can do a lot with a good theme and the built in thee design tools, or, if you’re a web developer, you can modify your themes PHP and CSS to create something completely unique. Just be sure that you followed the installation suggestions as to where to store themes and modules so that they won’t get overwritten by an upgrade.

This just brushes the surface, so I’ll do some deeper dives into Drupal configuration over the next few weeks.