Posts tagged with "cms"
Drupal Named the Best Open Source CMS
Drupal Wins Packt Publishing's Prize for the Second Year in a Row
Drupal was named the best open source content management system by Packt Publishing for the second year in a row! What a great prize for the huge community of developers who work on Drupal and have made it the robust, stable, and powerful platform that it is. It’s exciting to see Drupal recognized for what it’s achieved, and to see its portfolio grow to include some of the most well known names in the world like Harvard Science, NASA, Warner Brothers Music, Lifetime Television, and the United Nations, to name just a few.
Drupal has come a long when from when we first started working with it five years ago, and it’s fantastic to see all the hard work and smart ideas recognized. Congratulations to Drupalers!
Types of Foreign Language Websites and How Drupal Supports Them
A Look at What Drupal Can Do for Your Multilanguage Content
Gábor Hojtsy is a lead developer of expanded multilingual support in Drupal. You can read his other guest blog posts here and here.
To cater to the needs of multilanguage websites, Drupal and other content management systems should take into account the different uses of these sites and the unique content and interfaces they provide. For example, a search site where content will not be translated might need different languages in its interface, while a personal blog where posts are entered in different languages might need many different features.
I asked the Drupal community to tell me the use cases they used in internationalized websites in 2006. After going through this data and filtering the comments, I have identified the following practical use cases for websites built with an English-based system, such as Drupal, but that may also support foreign languages.
English (Factory Default) Only
This is the simplest use case. In fact, it means that the English "factory default" text can be used in the project and that English content is posted. User specified interface text is in English. This monolingual scenario is the simplest, and is always supported in every system.
English (Customized) Only
When one needs a customized English language website (different site design or different wording to account for U.S. and British English differences or stylistic requirements, for example), it is still quite close to what the system provides by default. User specified interface text is in English, and only some text and design elements need to be changed. Drupal makes this possible with the locale module, which is often suggested to be used to make arbitrary text modifications for stylistic reasons. Drupal 6 includes some optimization for this use case, letting site administrators include a short list of customized strings in the settings file and use that without the locale module.
Single Foreign Language Only
This monolingual scenario occurs when a website is built with a particular system, but the factory default language is completely replaced. This case requires that the interface text be completely translatable and that the language of the resulting site be configurable so its web pages show the correct content and the proper language code. Also, user specified interface text must be given in the actual language used. Drupal 5 supports this scenario with the locale module but does not give content the proper language association. This is improved in Drupal 6 with some performance improvements for single foreign language sites and content language associations.
If people can't find your site it doesn't matter how good it is. But thanks to the organization of Drupal, the OSS content management system we use to design most of our websites, these websites receive a high ranking with most search engines.
In a recent discussion on the CivicSpaceLabs
listserv Neil Drumm, the chief developer for CS, wrote that while CS and Drupal sites do not have a master index page for search engines it’s not needed because of the natural page linking that occurs within Drupal. Boris Mann, chief developer at , explains how and why this works:
“I can tell you that from my personal experience, Drupal sites are completely spidered by all search engines, and are naturally ranked
*very* highly. In fact, I like to say "search engine optimized by
default".
"The reason for this is the built in links to other content that
appears everywhere. e.g. pager, category links, recent posts blocks,
etc.”
Try this, it's free! Really, try it, it's free!
Why don't you want to try it?
When we first started Development Seed, with the goal of working one on one with NGOs to help them create websites that help their organization both internally and externally, the problem seemed simple… non-profits do not have the financial resources to pay for a good site. If they do get some cash on hand to pay for a site or a volunteer to build it the investment is traditionally looked at as a one time expense, just like printing a newsletter. Thus the site never changes nor grows and the organization is not capitalizing on the Internet as a method of communicating, which is an ongoing process, but rather just having some basic background literature in electronic format.