Drupal Multimedia is a short book, 235 pages including preface and summary chapter, but it has absolutely no fluff. There’s no rah-rah chapter explaining why Drupal is the greatest thing since buttered toast. There’s no installation chapter. There is no space wasted explaining basic CSS or HTML. The author assumes that you already have a working Apache/PHP/MySQL environment and Drupal 6 installation, can add modules, and that you know a reasonable amount of web coding and that you won’t freak out upon seeing instructions for some basic PHP tweaks. So if this sounds scary to you consider getting Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal and working through that first. It’s a more appropriate guide for the absolute beginner. But after you have the basics under your belt this is probably the best next book to get.

What the book does do is explain in cookbook style, how to add multimedia to Drupal using user contributed modules. It begins with two general purpose modules that add tremendous capabilities, the Content construction Kit (CCK) and the Views module. If you want to take Drupal beyond the basics these are important. Coverage of them is not extended but adequate, and you can see some of their more advanced capabilities through the examples given later in the book. Then the Image module is covered. I consider these three essential parts of any Drupal site and am glad that they get a good workout here.

The book then goes on to cover more specialized modules, explaining their use through examples that have legitimate real world application. A couple of the modules were written, at least in part, by Aaron Windburn and this book serves as a good user’s guide to them. Listing the modules covered probably serves little purpose out of context, so I’ll pass on that. There are also some CSS effects and some jQuery thrown in to spruce up your site.

As useful as this book is there are some small negatives. The index is only 5 pages long and only marginally worth the space. The table of contents on the publisher’s site is more useful. I caught a couple of typos. Since the multimedia capabilities are all explained in the context of specific modules, you might not find the exact match for your situation. Though the coverage of media related modules is excellent.

Still, this is a very useful book, one that would have saved me many dozens of hours searching through forums and tutorials had I had it even six months ago, and has even provide a more straightforward solution to embedded video than I’d been using. It also has me rethinking a photo gallery I spent too many hours figuring out. I’m referring to in on a current project.

Drupal Multimedia will definitely take the beginning to intermediate Drupal developer or webmaster to a new level of competence and basic sites to a new level of sophistication.

Highly recommended

In the world of Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS), there are currently two big names. Well, actually three but two are forks of the same original. Those programs are Joomla and Drupal. Joomla is a recent fork of Mambo and currently offer the (nearly) same features. There’s a whole lot of political hoo-haw over the split but for now, I’ll consider them functionally similar.

These are mid-tier CMS’s fine for serving hundreds of web pages from a MySQL database. They both are programmed in PHP, though knowledge of programming is not essential to use them. Both have long lists of features and longer lists of add-on plugins that extend their capabilities. How to choose?

You might try looking at comparative charts of features. Good luck. Choosing a CMS is not the same thing as shopping for a car. Those features come at the very real price of complexity. These are not simple install and go applications. They both have long and steep learning curves.

If you have fairly standard and basic needs, I’d even go so far as to say that both are overkill and could hurt productivity and timely updating. If something is hard to use it won’t be. These are both programs that require a trained administrator.

Website Baker or CMS Made Simple are good choices for small business or organizations. Website Baker is a bit easier to use. CMS Made Simple is a bit more sophisticated. Both work well and are a better choice than either Joomla or Drupal for the typical website.

But you have deeper and greater needs. You need calendars and PDF generation. You need complex directories, news publishing and repurposing of content. You need to tackle these more complex systems.

What sets the mid-tier systems apart from their simpler cousins is that content is stored separately from pages. It can be reused in multiple pages, either in whole or part. This offers an amazing degree of flexibility in creating a site structure but does require more effort to work with.

Both systems have sophisticated user access management that allows an administrator to grant authoring, editing or admin privileges to all or parts of a site. If a person only has to use the CMS interface to write articles and can leave publishing to someone else, they can get by with a minimum of training.

Joomla

So far we have looked at the similarities but these are really two different animals. Joomla excels at complicated page layouts. Content can be placed in up to a dozen of different places on a page and each page can be totally different, if you choose to make them so. It seems that it was designed from the top down, starting with display then writing the code to make the display work.

Unfortunately, that makes it painstaking to manage and somewhat brittle. The HTML it generates is pretty ugly. Because it makes a large number of server calls, pages are a bit slow to load and Joomla isn’t particularly search engine friendly. The development team is aware of these shortcoming and is working to address them but this is a big program and changes have to be made carefully.

Still, it works, and some nice sites have been built with Joomla. Another plus is that there is an active and talented community of template and add-on builders that give the CMS a lot of added value. One of the modules might just be perfect for your needs. The general level of design sophistication that you can find with commercially sold templates is excellent, much higher than that offered by Drupal.

Drupal

Drupal is built from the bottom up. Programming functionality takes precedence over complex layouts. The code is clean. Sites load quickly and Drupal is one of the most SEO (search engine optimization) friendly of current CMS’s.

Drupal started in the arena of community building and it has no peer there. CivicSpace, a special selection of Drupal modules, was the engine behind the very successful Web fund raising campaign of Presidential hopeful Howard Dean.

But Drupal is not just another portal. It is actually an incredibly flexible system that can be molded around most site needs. Unfortunately that flexibility is hidden behind the worst jargon I’ve seen in the CMS universe. Instead of sections and entries we get taxonomies, for goodness sake and nodes.

One of the most difficult learning hurdles is wrapping yourself around Drupal’s unnecessarily opaque terminology. However, the rewards are worth it. The system is actually quite elegant, once you figure it out.

For my part, I’m willing to accept some design inflexibility in Drupal for the more feature flexible CMS. Like Joomla, it has a hundreds of add-on modules. As expected from its roots, those related to community building are the more polished. Drupal has fewer commerce related add ons than Joomla. Though both have good shopping carts and image gallery systems.

Both systems have active and avid developer and user communities. Both have enthusiastic tutorials written by their members. Unfortunately, both suffer from the common malady of Open Source projects. Documentation is inconsistent and not of commercial quality. We are not dealing with Photoshop or Dreamweaver here, with whole bookshelves of help or community college classes just a credit card purchase away.

On the other hand both have active and helpful forums that in large part make up for the lack of written documentation.

Unless you are a fairly experienced web designer who has a good understanding HTML and CSS, at a minimum, either of these systems might throw you in the deep end without an adequate life preserver. You will have to learn to swim quickly or drown. A basic understanding of PHP and MySQL wouldn’t hurt either. Though you can do without.

You can create large, feature rich and sophisticated sites with either of these systems. Unfortunately, the dream of a truly simple yet powerful CMS is still a long way from reality.

Joomla
[rate 3.0]

Drupal

[rate 3.5]

A KISS in time

I’m a firm believer in the KISS (keep it simple stupid) principle. With a content management system (CMS) that means avoiding feature-itis and looking for the simplest system that will get the job done. There is a simple equation to consider. More features = more complexity. The corollary to that is the more complex a system is the less likely it is to get used.

Content management systems run that gamut from very basic to very, very complicated. High end systems usually need a person or department of people to keep them functioning. Such systems are appropriate for large corporations but not for small businesses or organizations. In this context, I’m only discussing server based systems that you administer from a web browser. There are desktop options, too. Those will get covered in another article.

On the other end of the spectrum are roll-your-own systems that struggle to meet even the most basic of needs. Many PHP programming books build some kind of content management system as their learning project. That may be a good way to learn to do web and database programming I wouldn’t recommend such a system for anyone but a programmer who want the satisfaction that comes from building something yourself. For most of us an existing system would best suit our needs.

A CMS appropriate for Mom and Pop can run from free to a few hundred dollars. Free is good. I love free and use a couple of free systems myself. I also think that if a commercial system best fits a particular need it is cheaper in the long run to pay for it. What you need to do is figure out what your needs are.

What features are important?

The very basics

At the very least you need to be able to easily change content on existing pages. Content can include text, images, embedded Flash, audio and video. You also need to be able to add an delete pages easily and have the CMS automatically adjust your site navigation to reflect those changes. I’d pay particular attention to adding images to a page. Some systems make that very easy, some don’t.

Unless you are comfortable with HTML you will probably also want a built in WYSIWYG editor that will allow you to format text and place images in your pages. You will likely have to use a Mozilla based web browser, like Camino or Firefox to take advantage of this feature. Most WYSIWYG editors won’t function fully with Safari or other Apple WebKit based browsers like OmniWeb. This is just a minor point but worth noting.

Many systems have a built in WYSIWYG editor. If they don’t, is possible for a competent web designer to add a WYSIWYG editor to almost any system. So, if a CMS meets your needs otherwise, don’t rule it out for lack of an editor. This speaks as much to selecting a designer as it does a CMS.

Administration

You can go down a checklist and tick of features, but it is much more subjective to evaluate a system’s administration section. I’ll back up here to say that most conten management systems consist of two separate sections. There is the public one that visitors see and a private one where you control the site, add and edit pages, administer users, change site settings an so forth. For me the ease of use that a CMS offers is the make or break decision. Two systems may offer identical features but one is easy to use and one isn’t.

Unfortunately, what seems logical to me may not make sense to you. Fortunately, you can preview a number of CMS’s at Open Source CMS. That only covers free, PHP based systems, so is far from definitive, but it does give a sampling of what is available and a chance to see what you like.

Documentation & user community

The best programmed system in the world is useless if you can’t run it. There are some clever CMS programmers around who offer their wares with no or inadequate documentation. I pass them by. I highly recommend that before you even take the time to “kick the tires” of a CMS that you visit the developer’s site and see what kind of documentation and support is available. Also check to see if there is a list of off site resources.

Typically, you’ll find three kinds of support:

• Formal documentation, including how to install, customize and administer the CMS, is vital. See if there is any and if there is how complete it is. Many developers put up Wikis in the hopes that a community will form that will somehow create documentation for the CMS. Often those will seem to have many pages, but when you actually look you’ll find that pages are empty or have token content. Wikis make nice cooperative documentation platforms, but only if they are used. Also see if the documentation that is there makes sense. If it is written by and to programmers it will be useless for the rest of us.

• User forums are where you will typically get your specific questions answered. Active forums are gold. Check to see how may posts there are and how many answers get posted to questions. Also look at posting dates to see if questions are answered quickly. Forums are not a substitute for documentation.

• Off site documentation, tutorials, themes and add-ons indicate that a CMS has an active community that has grown up around it. Sometimes third party tutorials are better than a system’s official documentation.

Nice to have

All the features mentions so far are pretty standard and should have the simplest sites covered. There are some other features that most people could use.

High on that list is the ability to create sub-pages or sub-categories. Say you have an About US section and want to create several pages in that section like: policies and procedures, history, mission statement, and so on. The ability of a system to handle sub-category pages that group logically related material can make your site much easier to navigate.

Templates

Templates are good. One of the goals of a CMS is to separate content management from web design. The easiest way to do so is to separate design from the logic code in the CMS program. Templates allow you to design or have designed a site that fits your branding needs and add a few extra tags to your template pages that will take the content from the database and insert it into your pages.

Template systems range from very simple to quite complex but the most complicated system I’ve used, Wordpress, is still an order of magnitude easier to work with than a system that requires you to edit bits of HTML inserted in the middle of PHP code spread over many separate files like PostNuke.

Another advantage of templating systems is that you have much greater control over how your pages will look. Going back to PostNuke, which is a very capable system, your site will always look like a PostNuke system. Form follows function to a degree but I don’t want my sites looking like they were created by a cookie cutter.

You might want to go even further and have the ability to assign different templates by page, or section of a site. I’m not advocating having every page look radically different but it is handy to have more or fewer columns, color coded site sections, and so on.

User privileges

If you are going to run a site yourself or with one or two people you know well, the ability to manage site users may not be important. Give everyone full access and forget about it. If you want to have multiple contributers it is very helpful to be able to assign just enough site management ability as each person needs.

A site needs an administrator who has full privileges, who can add or control other site users and can control the entire running of the site. Beyond that your needs will vary as will the ability to fine tune privileges. Decide who needs what access to what part of your site and match that against a system’s user management options. I’ve seen a CMS that had 24 levels of administrative system privileges. I can’t imaging needing that fine a grained control but you may.

Multiple content sections

Your main page content generally lives in the middle of your pages. Do you want the same content in all or your site’s side columns or do you want the ability to have page specific, optional content? There is no generally recognized term for these extra content sections. I love them. Some systems don’t offer them.

Extras

There are hundreds of features that different content management systems offer. Many of them are very useful but few are essential to a small website. Check the developer’s site to see if an extra you want is offered as a plugin or module. Each CMS may use a different term for add ons to the system.

Some extras that I find useful are: image galleries, embed Flash, podcasting, file uploads/downloads, visitor comments, RSS feeds (create or import), send to a friend and site maps. One I think is over-used is a sign-in function. Unless you are selling and need to remember visitor information or are running a closed forum, think long and hard before you add a function that can drive visitors away as an unnecessary sign-in will do.

Check the developer’s site to see if an extra you want is offered as a plugin or module. The CMS may use a different term for add ons to the system.

Wrapping it up

This is only a quick overview of CMS basic functions. Whole books can be written on the subject. My strong bias is to find a CMS that is easy to use and offers the minimum features I need.

I’ve built sites for organizations that have big dreams for their sites but found that nobody used their CMS because it was to hard to operate. I’m talking about popular systems here, like Mambo/Joomla, Nuke variants and Drupal. These CMS’s are all feature rich and powerful. I’d also say that they need a very web knowledgeable person running them.

If in doubt, start with a blog. They are stripped down content management systems aimed at offering frequently update content. If you really want the easy entry, use a hosted system like [Blogger])(http://blogger.com}, TypePad or LiveJournal.

If you want more features and control and customizability, Wordpress and [Movable Type] have hundreds of add-ons and large, active user communities. Either can be massaged into a pretty capable general purpose CMS.

Some good basic content management systems include: Website Baker, CMS Made Simple and Etomite. After a year of testing systems I chose these three as my favorites. I had my web design students try these three CMS’s out. They found Website Baker to be the easiest to use. But it was only 15 students in the sample and they had all be influenced by my teaching, so it may or may not be a representative sample.

My favorite of the more capable systems is Expression Engine. It isn’t free but very capable. I find it the easiest to set up and use of the more powerful systems. My second choice is the open source Joomla.

If you don’t see your favorite mentioned, don’t feel slighted. There are so many options that it is impossible to test them all.

Beyond the Brochure

To get repeat visitors to your site you need to offer something people want. Your site has to be a resource worth visiting. That means that it either has to have a large enough body of useful content to attract people or it has to continually offer something new, preferably both. Quantity and quality of content are the two legs a successful site will run on.

Very occasionally someone will offer a single incredibly clever feature that will drive visits for a while. But if it’s that good somebody will soon copy it and pull the traffic away.

To have consistent and adequate content, you need to be able to contribute to your site easily. You will have enough to do creating content without having to also worry about also dealing with the technical details of web design. You need the automation that a CMS offers.

Lower Maintenance Costs

There are a number of benefits to using a content management system on an active site. If your site is just going to sit there with the same content for years, don’t bother reading on. Also, don’t expect much in the way of results from your site.

Setting a small site up with a CMS will typically be more expensive than putting up a few regular web pages, at least initially. Reduced maintenance expense is one of a content management system’s advantages. Since the design work is all done, a person with little training can maintain the site. At $50-100 per hour web designer fees it doesn’t take long to more than pay for the slightly higher initial cost. So, even if you don’t plan on putting up a big site, you can still benefit in reduced cost of ownership.

You Have More Control

The corollary to lower maintenance cost is a greater control over your site. Because it is relatively easy to maintain you can do it yourself or have an employee take care of your updates. And if it’s easier to update it is much more likely to have fresh content. Isn’t it nice when things actually make sense?

Your Site as a Business Tool

Do you want repeat visitors? Use a content management system. Use it to add to your site often. It is really that simple. If Jack visits your site twice and sees exactly the same stuff on it he most likely will never come back. Why should he? He’s seen it all. If he visits Jill’s site and finds something new each time he just might make it a regular stop in his internet ramblings.

It doesn’t matter if the site is a blog, an online store or a run-of-the mill web site. Content is what people come for and new or deep content keeps them coming back. Content can be new articles, photos, media, games, reference material, discussions or products. Whatever it is that you offer, if you want traffic you have to continually offer something new.

Getting Real

There are multiple levels of web participation. At the lowest end is the simple brochure site. That’s what most “web designers” offer and it serves a purpose. Much like a business card, you need a website to look professional. You have to have one because not having one will make you look amateur or backward. But neither a brochure site nor a business card will do more than say to your customers, “I’m in business.”

In most cases a brochure site won’t drive sales, but it may keep you from losings them to a competitor who does have a website. It won’t increase brand exposure but it may help reinforce it, if integrated well with your other promotional literature. It won’t attract visitors, unless it is incredibly clever and special. The only people who will visit are those you have personally told about the site or who have seen it advertised in other places. Few will visit it often. Fewer still, if any, will link to it.

The administrator sits at the top of the heap, able to completely control the site and its users. At the bottom are users who can only read content. In between people get varying degrees of control over what happens to the site.

Say, you want registered users to be able to contribute to your site but you also want to be able to vet or edit the content before it’s published. No problem. Or you want proven authors to be able to post directly to the site and edit their own articles but not those of others. Or, you may want to give editing as well as publishing privileges to a couple of people. Most current systems allow at least this level of administrative discrimination. Some give super fine grained control with up to two dozen levels of access. Whether that fills a legitimate need or was simply done because it could be done, I don’t know. If it’s important to you, look for lots of administrative user levels when you evaluate systems.

Beyond authors and editors are system administrators, again with varying levels of control and access to the system. Super admins have as much control of the system as possible. These people can modify the system, add plug-ins and change templates and control system access. Someone else may only be able to add or delete registered members. Other may have more privileges but only to certain sections of the site. Again, various systems allow varying degrees of control.

With small organizations, one or two people may do everything. Larger organizations may have dozens of people with varying responsibilities. Unless a company is specifically oriented toward publishing it will be difficult to find many people who will actually contribute to a website. Unless directly pressured to, most people will not keep a site current, despite their best intentions or those of management.

The other site site is 7 years old and belongs to a print/graphic design shop that also is talking about re-designing their site. The they’ve been talking about re-designing it for the last three years, so, we’ll see. That leaves 85% of my sites that aren’t made of just static web pages. If you count the actual number of pages on content management systems it comes to 99+ percent.

Obviously, these are not all new sites. Also obviously, the typical independent web designer doesn’t have that many really current sites. Am I just super fast to keep so may sites going? Not hardly. Since I have no web design super powers I had to have help. And that help came from the site owners themselves.

As I mentioned, these sites were built using content management systems. I created the sites, both design and structure then trained my clients in how to maintain them. Or, if the client wants me to maintain the site, I use the CMS to update it, saving a great deal of time over using plain vanila HTML. Unless a web designer intends to make a living doing HTML revisions, I honestly don’t see why s/he should do it any other way.

So what is a content management system? There are a couple of answers. One is that a CMS is a program that separates content from design and storage. That means that a content creator or maintainer doesn’t have to know anything – or very little – about web design. The system separates the design and storage part of the process and lets the end user simply worry about content, which can be text, images, audio, video, Flash, whatever. A blog is the simplest example of a CMS.

To add to this blog I click on a bookmark in my web browser, fill out three fields in a form and click Publish. That’s it.

WordPress the blog system I’m using takes care of all the other details including: placing the post or page in a database, creating all the links to the article, placing the post or an excerpt of the post on the main page, creating an archive page and linking to if via either a date or a category based link, creating the archive pages that store this and all other posts, sending out Trackbacks, creating an RSS feed,; creating an editable record of the post in the administration section of the site, and numerous other tasks. That’s a lot of benefit for a few clicks and a copy and paste. And that’s why a CMS makes a lot of sense.

Another way to define content management systems is noting the ability of some systems to re-purpose content in different formats. Enterprise systems may allow people to create Word or PDF documents as well as web pages from just one source document. I can’t afford anything like that and neither can the clients I work with.

Wikipedia defines a content management system as:

A content management system (CMS) is a computer software system for organizing and facilitating collaborative creation of documents and other content. A content management system is frequently a web application used for managing websites and web content, though in many cases, content management systems require special client software for editing and constructing articles. The market for content management systems remains fragmented, with many open-source and proprietary solutions available.

Such a definition encompasses quite a few different solutions. Blogs would fit, as would shopping carts and both server and client side content management systems. Even web design software like Dreamweaver and GoLive could be shoe-horned into this definition.

A List Apart puts it this way:

But they are all based on the same idea: CM allows designers to focus on design by building templates. Subject experts build content in a separate environment. The server takes the content, inserts it into the correct template and sends it all, neatly wrapped up, to end users.But they are all based on the same idea: CM allows designers to focus on design by building templates. Subject experts build content in a separate environment. The server takes the content, inserts it into the correct template and sends it all, neatly wrapped up, to end users.