All Hands On – Drupal Orientation

On Tuesday, 10/13, we had 12 people from the greater Chicago area attend the 1st ever Duo Drupal Hands-On Workshop. The roster was an impressive display of NFPs & community organizations; including the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education, the American Library Association, Lombard Area Libraries, and the Theosophical Society in America. Sonny Cohen, Director of Internet Marketing Strategy, and I took to the stage. We began with a 45 minute history and description of Drupal as a Content Management System and Web Content Framework. After that our students followed along on their own laptops connected to our server as we walked through the Drupal back-end. Attendees learned how to change the front page, chose a different theme, create content, add a field to a content-form, and other common Drupal administrative functions. Judging by reactions the program was just the right mixture of geeky tech-talk and practical experience with Drupal.  We plan to offer this again January 12, 2010.

Drupal Camp Planning – Hold the Date: December 12 & 13, 2009

Later that week we doubled down with Drupal. First we hosted the DrupalCamp Chicago planning meeting. In one afternoon we made tremendous headway on gathering sponsors, A/V equipment, and volunteers. A big THANKS goes to Tiffany Ferris of Palantir.net who couldn’t join us for the meeting but did handle the mundane details like date and location. December 12-13 at the Hotel Orrington in Evanston Il.

Following the planning meeting Duo hosted the monthly gathering of the Chicago Drupal MeetUp Group (CDMUG). Forty plus people filed into the spacious Duo Consulting Bistro enjoying pizza, drinks, snacks and the large wall projection. I presented on the Demo and Demo_Profile modules. These can be used to roll a website back to a specific point in time as well as easily create install profiles. Lisa Fischer Presented “Extended user Profiles utilizing Panels 3, Ctools, Views 2.” As usual much free time was spent mingling, socializing and getting to know our fellow Drupalers better.

Rinse & Repeat

Thank you to those who attended the Duo Drupal Workshop, the DrupalCamp Chicago planning meeting, and the monthly CDMUG. Duo has benefited greatly from Drupal. Rapid application deployment, extensibility, and open source are only a few reasons its fits our business strategy. The Drupal community is essential and we very much enjoy being involved. In fact… We’ll see the CDMUG gang in the Duo Bistro again for the upcoming January 12 meeting! You are invited, too.  See you there, er, here.

Duo Consulting, IBM, many major universities, the United States and other governments and corporations of every size utilize web servers operating on some version of Linux. Linux is also a free and popular substitute for Windows on many PC laptops and desktops. MAC OS users have enjoyed using Linux commands and programs for years. BSD-Unix has been under the Mac hood since the release of OS-X.

Duo Consulting was among the many companies who sent staffers to the 2009 Ohio Linux Fest. The Columbus Hyatt played host with the main events happening in the adjacent Columbus Convention Center.  I was among the 1,100 attendees at this year’s event.

Members of the Indiana Drupal Users Group and I staffed the Drupal exhibit. We garnered a tremendous amount of attention. Our exhibit had 2 screens showing slide show of famous Drupal sites. These included  GreenPeace, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Amnesty International, MTV – United Kingdom, Warner Bros Records. Visitors to the Drupal exhibit listened to me explain how Duo uses Drupal and Linux servers to provide value and solutions to our clients through rapid deployment, scalability, a modular framework, and leveraging the large development community that exists around Drupal.

It’s not quite that simple, of course, even though Google makes Internet search look like the easiest thing in the world.

What Do You Mean By Search?

First, there needs to be clarity on what someone means by talking about “search” — are we talking about search functionality within the website itself (ie, internal site search)? or are we talking about how people might search to find your site (i.e., external search)? There are approaches and techniques to deal with each type of search, and there is certainly some overlap between them, but they are very different issues. The information here is focused on internal site search.

Where Does That Internal Site Search Result Come From?

It’s important to understand where your search results are really coming from. Most searches are not done in real-time (that is, actually searching your website content at the time you put in your search term), but rather are running against a search index of some kind. A search index is a pre-defined, static pool of possible results. The value of a search index is that all the hard work of filtering for possible relevant terms, weighting relevancy, and optimization have already been done — so when a site visitor actually performs a search, it’s usually pretty fast and pretty on-target for what that person was looking for. The downside of a search index is that it’s a picture of your content at a particular time, so if that content changes (including adding content or deleting content) but the index isn’t updated, people won’t find that updated content.

There are some specialized searches that are done in real-time. For instance, many of Duo’s legal sites have specialized attorney searches that filter by office or practice area. Since these searches are running directly against the main content, they are always up-to-date — but they may not be as fast, and there’s no “results weighting” that can be done once the results come back.

Results weighting is also known as relevancy. It is a very important element to your search results. If you search for “dog”, you probably want those top results to be really focused on dog information. Search engines generally “guess” at that relevancy through a series of rules or parameters. For instance: is “dog” in the title of the page? Is it a term that’s used repeatedly in the body of the content? etc., etc. Very good search engines have been refining those rules for years now, but they rarely expose those rules to the public, since those rules are their competitive advantage.

There are, however, search engines that you can use that will allow you, as the website owner, the ability to tweak those rules to best match your particular content. Obviously the advantage of using one of these engines is that you have the ability to fine-tune your website’s search results. The downside is that this does require some effort, and that effort is ongoing — as your content changes over time, you are likely going to need to periodically revisit the rules you’ve established in your search engine.

Search Options

So on a practical level, what are your options for search? Listed below are some of the search options that Duo Consulting uses. This is not, by any means, an exhaustive listing of search options available. It’s just meant to provide a sense of the variety of options that exist.

eZ Search

eZ Search comes built-in with any site built on the eZ Publish Content Management System. Because it’s built into the system, you can control the frequency with which the site index is built. Thus, if you’re changing the content on your site quite often, you’ll have the ability to make sure that your search results will reflect those changes in a timely manner. There’s no weighting or relevancy, however.

eZ Find

eZ Find also works with the eZ Publish Content Management System. It’s built on the Solr open source search server, and it does allow for very fine-grained relevancy tweaking and options for indexing frequency. It also allows for searches to be done on an entirely separate server from the website itself — an important consideration if your site gets a lot of traffic and you need to consider how to decrease the load on your site as much as possible.

Drupal Search

Drupal, another Content Management System, also has search functionality built into it. As with eZ Search, it’s relatively simple and basic, although you do have control over how frequently your content is indexed. There are some modules (ie, Porter-Stemmer) that can be used in conjunction with the default search to raise the level of sophistication.

Acquia Drupal Search

Acquia is a commercially supported version of Drupal, and they have a search engine which is also based on Solr technology. It can either be used as an externally hosted service (billing is based on the volume of content), or you can use the module built by Acquia and set up a local Solr server. It offers relevance, author filtering (useful for sites using social media), term highlighting, and content recommendations.

Third-Party Search

Third-party search engines, such as Freefind or Google, can be seamlessly integrated into your website. You can retain the look and feel of your site, while at the same time leveraging the power of a search engine company that has already spent the time and effort to refine the relevancy rules. The search index itself, however, is something that you will only have limited control over in terms of indexing frequency and relevancy weighting.

There are a few things that you can do to guide third-party search engines. You can create sitemaps (essentially an XML map of your content that’s easy for search engines to digest), and some third-party search engines do have an on-demand indexing option.

Custom Search

A custom search is a search that’s so specific to certain content that it makes the most sense to custom-code it into the website. This often works for simple things (again, the example of filtering attorneys by office and/or practice area), and the search results are always up-to-date — but a more complex search result requirement begins to creep into re-inventing-the-wheel territory, so this should be used judiciously.

Things to Consider When Planning Your Internal Site Search Strategy

So having said all of this, what kind of search will work best for you? If you can answer the following questions, you’ll be well on your way to figuring out the best solution to fit your needs.

How much content will I have?

If you have a lot of website content, then you will probably need a more sophisticated search engine for the internal search on your site. If you don’t have a lot of content now, then certainly this is something you’d want to evaluate as the site grows — what works on Day One of the site launching may not be as useful a year later.

How much traffic will I have?

If your site has a lot of traffic, then you’ll probably want to consider moving the search traffic off to a server that’s separate from your own site, or a third-party search engine. As with content, this is a situation you’ll want to periodically re-evaluate.

How frequently will I want that content indexed, so that the search results are freshest?

Instantly? Hourly? daily? weekly? If your content must be 100% fresh 100% of the time, then you’ve narrowed your choices to search engines that you’ll have direct access to controlling the refresh time. That said, this is something to look at carefully — does it really have to be that closely in sync with real-time content updates?

How much fine-tuning and/or control do I want over the search results?

…and how much effort do you want to put towards that fine-tuning and control? If this is important for you (i.e., you want to make sure that content within an employee’s primary biography is weighted more heavily in search results than his or her community activities), then you’ll want a search engine that you can have that level of control over. On the other hand, it will mean a commitment on your part to invest in the time to experiment and tweak those settings, and that will probably need to be revisited over time as your content changes as well.

There are still quite a few nuances to talk through beyond this, but tackling these questions at the beginning will certainly get you most of the way there.

What About External Search?

If you are concerned about how public search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) will find your site, then you will be focused on optimizing your site for that: Search Engine Optimization (SEO). They key to good SEO for your site is good content, of course, but beyond that, Duo would be happy to speak with you about detailed approaches and strategies for your site.

It is surprising to some newcomers to Drupal to find some rather famous names replying to their posts or chatting with them in Internet Relay Chat. Book authors, module developers, world traveling trainers, all make themselves available in a variety of ways. The community atmosphere is truly nurtured by the predominant willingness of the individuals to connect and keep connected to one another.

Duo Consulting is doing what so many other shops continue to do. I’m going to DrupalCamp Los Angeles and this past weekend to DrupalCamp Altanta to provide quality training. It’s rare that the attendees are ever charged for a DrupalCamp and many other Drupal events. On the occasion that a charge occurs it usually covers the event costs that sponsorships didn’t cover. With the presenters not being paid it is vital that the business that employ these presenters keep them out and active in the community where they can have an impact. Duo is doing just that.

Local Drupal meetup groups are smaller than large gatherings, but are no less in need of the support of local businesses. Duo is  hosting the October 15th gathering of the Chicago Drupal MeetUp Group, CDMUG. The group boasts a large membership which means meetings have an RSVP limit. We’re looking at about 50 attendees to enjoy our Bistro area in our office. Members of our team will do a case study on a large Drupal project.

Looking out two months Duo is getting more and more excited for DrupalCamp Chicago to arrive in December. Last year’s two day camp was attended by a couple of Duo developers who reported a very worthwhile and educational experience. Duo will be sponsoring the event this year as well as providing presenters.

Prevailing Hate
I hate awards for two reasons. First, aiming to win awards is a terrible incentive.  I mean, do you want your website developer to say, “We’re going to build you a website that will win you some really great awards!” Or would you rather they say, “We’re going to build you a website that is going to achieve your business objectives!”  Can you do both? Maybe.  But which fence is that web developer swinging for?  Your needs? Or more plaques on their wall? Why should there be any distraction from the obvious objective.

Second, most web award programs suck. Quite simply, they often reward pretty websites. Rarely is there any serious lifting of the hood to find out how robust the site is. Criteria such as interaction, information architecture, usability, content quality, search optimization, engagement,  goal and conversion orientation are rarely part of the evaluation. That’s because these essential requirements are also the hardest to judge. But everybody has an opinion about pretty.  Web awards often reward pretty junk.

Embraceable Love
I love website awards almost as passionately as I hate them. Usually so much effort goes into the creation of a good website that it’s wonderful to see these business solutions recognized. Moreover, the site development is generally driven by internal client staff who sweat bullets producing their online presence. When their site is recognized with an award, it’s just great seeing them and their organizations get the recognition they deserve

And don’t think those acrylic and lacquered wood awards don’t mean something. I closed an award winning computer business in 1993 and among the last things I tossed out – 16 years later – were some of the award plaques this business had won. Even after the business is toast, the awards validated a lot of the effort.

And the Winners Are……
Today, the Web Marketing Association announced their WebAwards for 2009. And I have no ambivalence in celebrating the winners.  Duo is one of a handful of companies worldwide that won 5 or more web awards. Our client sites that received recognition include:

• comScore- Marketing Standard of Excellence
• Youth Ready Chicago – Government Standard of Excellence
• American Library Association – Non-Profit Standard of Excellence
• Burnham Nationwide – Consulting Standard of Excellence
• Illinois Humanities Council – Non-Profit Standard of Excellence
• PricePlease, Inc. – Outstanding Website

A tip of the hat to these organizations. I want to believe that in all cases their business objectives were paramount on our development agenda and the sites are now meetings these performance objectives.

Of course, the award plaques won’t look too bad on our wall.

So we’ve decided to offer a hands-on Drupal Training Workshop to dig a little deeper into the question of why Drupal is getting a lot of buzz.  Let me emphasize right away that this workshop is aimed at website administrators and marketers who are NOT deeply technical. Web developers who are technical but want to also understand the business case for using Drupal would also find this workshop useful. I took a very similar course from Doug over the summer and found it to be a great way to orient myself to Drupal. And this course has the advantage of also being hands-on.

We think that some of the likely candidates for this workshop include people who are in the following situations:

Leverage Social Media
Drupal is social publishing software.  Chances are you are encountering challenges integrating social media with your present content management software. You can find out if Drupal might take you closer to where you want to be.

Micro Sites
We know that a complete corporate website overhaul may not be in the cards for you today, but you may have some business initiatives you want to pursue online.  When budget and timeline are significant constraints, Drupal may offer an implementable solution. Our client, the Lake County Forest Preserve District just launched a simple Drupal microsite on a very short leash. Not only was the outcome successful, but they have a Drupal site in which they might explore capabilities in anticipation of some future re-development of the District’s main website.

Dated, Proprietary or Non-existent Content Management System
Perhaps you are still managing your website using either page-based content management systems like Adobe’s Contribute or just making changes in the HTML website code. The Drupal CMS might provide a relatively easy evolution of your website to something considerably more powerful and requiring fewer technical skills to manage.

I suspect I haven’t captured the scenario of everyone who might be interested in migrating their website to Drupal. For an investment of your morning on October 13, 2009 and $40, you can assess your website problem against this solution. It could be a very efficient way to gain clarity on your requirements as well as evaluate this particular option.

If you are interested in one of the 18 seats available, you can register here.

Serena Collage Goes Terminal

At the same time, the content management system on which the BeckerCPA.com website was operating, Serena Collage, was approaching its technology end-of-life. Although the content management system was performing suitably, Serena, had announced there would be no further upgrades and support would be ending for its Collage web content management system (CMS). Although there was no imminent urgency, the prudent path for Becker, as well as all Serena Collage customers, was to make plans to replace Collage with a suitable CMS alternative.

Choosing a Replacement Content Management System

The first task was to identify a content management system that could not only replace the feature set of Collage but also accommodate the unique needs of the business units being integrated into the website.  Together with Becker, Duo selected Hannon Hill’s Cascade Server CMS. Cascade Server offered two immediate benefits. Cascade Server’s architecture and publishing model is very similar to that of Collage.  Replacing Collage with Cascade Server requires only a modest amount of retraining for site administrators. And in ways that it does differ, Cascade Server is easier to navigate for making site changes.

Migrating Content

The second non-trivial task was migrating the content from different sites with different or non-existent CMS into Cascade Server. To facilitate this migration, Duo customized Hannon Hill’s script for automating the migration of Collage’s “Contribution Types” into Cascade Server’s “Asset Factories” as well as WYSIWYG to WYSIWYG.

More Considerations

A project of this magnitude is littered with details. The BeckerCPA website is integrated with LearnLive, a separate course management system and a script drives the daily data refresh. Duo also acknowledged the legacy value of the old website pages.  Important landing pages from the old website were mapped and redirected to similarly relevant pages of the new website.

As companies continue to upgrade and revise their nth generation websites, the task of migrating old sites to the new is becoming increasingly complex. Developing a plan of action and including the migration effort into the scope of the project are essential considerations to achieve a successful outcome.

Open Source

Drupal is open source. This means that no one owns the code that makes Drupal what it is. It is also FREE to download and FREE to modify. Indeed, a 10,000 plus sized developer community is making Drupal better all the time. Drupal is indeed a Web Content Management System (CMS). In the 21st century it is not acceptable to have a website that only a programmer can control. A robust CMS like Drupal allows the end user to add, delete, edit, moderate, and publish the content that is on their site. This puts the power of the website into the hands of the site-owner NOT keeping it in the hands of the site-developer.

Social Publishing Software

Drupal is social publishing software. The prevailing idea behind Web2.0 is to have user contributed content on your site. Drupal allows users to create content, blogs, articles, new groups, multimedia, etc. Drupal also allows finite control of permissions so that only allowed users can add specific types of content to the site.

Web Application Framework

Drupal is a Web Application Framework. If you have some new and inventive idea that has never before been done on the web, bring your napkin sketches to Drupal. The well documented and well designed Application Program Interface (API) will aid you in writing the code to allow Drupal to make your idea into reality.

Large Developer Community

Drupal is a LARGE and growing community. Drupal is controlled by no one but owned by everyone. The community thrives on a concept that is sometimes described as “Collaboration, not competition.” By doing this, the community organically forms into overlapping cells of teams that take on the necessary tasks that have made Drupal an enterprise level solution to the web development needs of mom-&-pops, NGOs, NFPs, and Fortune 500’s as well. The community successfully handles security updates, feature adds, accessibility concerns, and the ever changing integration methods employed by 3rd party entities such as Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others.

Drupal continues to win awards every year in a variety of categories from a variety of sources. Many members of the Drupal community are celebrated authors, employees of major companies, holders of multiple degrees, and genuinely nice people who donate a lot of free time to grow and aide the Drupal project and community. More and more companies are leveraging Drupal to build large scale, feature rich sites in relatively short time spans. With Drupal and all of its add-on modules being free, companies can spend more of their resources on configuration rather than the old system where every new project started out with re-writing a lot of the same old code.

Yesterday, the Downtown Highland Park Alliance sent an email highlighting reasons to come to downtown and do business. Sponsored, as it is, by the downtown merchants, these retailers and restaurants are featured for their offerings and specials.

When the Alliance promoted their upcoming weekend, they featured City Park Grill in the FIFTH section of their email and second text listing (think scroll….) under This Week’s Specials.  They got the 6 oz. Skirt Steak dinner price wrong.

So the Alliance fixed it. They sent a Correction email exclusively featuring City Park Grill and an accurate listing of their specials. In this case, the error by the Merchant Association created an opportunity to focus on City Park Grill.  I never noticed City Park Grill in the original email. But I sure took notice when I received the featured correction. A marketing error creates a make-good that’s better than the original promotion. For City Park Grill it was good that they got it wrong. And all’s well that ends well.

First, in an otherwise tough economic environment, being a fast growing Internet-based company suggests that we are in a sector of the economy that remains vibrant.  Business managers should take note that even though marketing budgets are taking it on the chin, available marketing dollars are being diverted to an increasing number of Internet initiatives. So while gross marketing budgets may be depressed, Internet spending is being sustained. Check your budget allocation to insure you are moving in the same direction.

Second, I had to think about whether being a fast-growing company is a good thing.  When you grow quickly, client relationships might suffer, a growing employee head count might impact the existing intimate company culture, business infrastructure such as performance reporting or accounting may become stressed, and office facilities become tapped out.

All these challenges loom. But being in business is just a constant source of problem solving. And I’d rather deal with those problems associated with growth rather than those of stagnation. So based on surveys we’ve conducted from our client base, we’ve doubled-down our focus on client relationship management.  We have also moved to new headquarters this year which are a bit roomy today but permit us the space we need to continue our measured growth. And we’ve adopted an open-book management style to more effectively embrace everyone who works at Duo and help them appreciate how the individual efforts of each person contribute to our success.

Growth is good. But it is only sustainable if we continue to support our clients who support us. And we can only do that if we continue to have the enthusiasm, energy and creativity of the people at Duo. It’s a balancing act I’ve managed at Duo for a decade and it’s great to have our achievement receive this national recognition from Inc. Magazine. Toot. Toot.