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Conversations about blog posts are increasingly taking place on Twitter in addition to the comments section of blogs.  Due to this trend, over the last six months we’ve seen lots of blogs integrate tweetbacks into their comment sections.  Building on the trackback concept, a tweetback searches Twitter for links to specific blog pots and displays relevant tweets in the comments section of your blog. 

I’ve had a variety of clients request this feature over the last few months, so we’ve spent some time figuring out how to get tweetbacks working in our core platform, Drupal and Wordpress. 

For Drupal, we did an exhaustive search for tweetback modules back in February and didn’t find any that work, so we developed our own custom module.  We are currently fine tuning the code we wrote and hope to release our Drupal tweetback module to the open source community in the next few months.

For Wordpress, there are quite a few tweetback modules to choose from.  We tried a handful of the plugins with mixed results.  I’m posting a quick review of our experience with each in the hopes that it saves time for others hoping to implement tweetbacks on their blog.

Before I dive in, please note that we did not test all of these plugins exhaustively.  In my mind, the point of plugins is to quickly add functionality without involving our development team.  So if I couldn’t get a plugin to work within an hour or so, I chose to cut my losses and move on to the next one instead of spending time debugging.

Tweetbacks and Tweetsuite by Dan Zarrella

As far as I can tell, Dan Zarrella was the first to build a tweetback plugin module for Wordpress back in January. 

His first take on it was a simple javascript solution called Tweetbacks.  While this solution probably works, it relies on inserting a javascript hosted on his personal server on your blog/website.  While this might be ok for some, we simply did not want to take the risk of inserting a javascript from an individual on a client website.

Later in January Dan released Tweetsuite, which moves away from javascript and includes a bunch of additional features.  This plugin looks awesome, but unfortunately we couldn’t get it to work on the two blogs we tried to implement it on and gave up.  The plugin also doesn’t have a lot of documentation, and from reading the comments it doesn’t sound like it is being actively supported.  So we grudgingly moved on.

Disqus

Disqus is a third-party commenting system that can actually take the place of your Wordpress commenting system.  I’ve written about it before, and use it on my personal blog.  I’m a fan of the product, and when I saw Disqus was adding social media reactions to its feature set I was anxious to try it out. 

We decided to install Disqus on our own ImpactWatch blog as a way of testing out tweetbacks and giving the the system a full test drive before recommending clients start using it.  Unfortunately, the tweetbacks feature in Disqus worked correctly for exactly one day and then mysteriously stopped and never got working again. Disqus has also periodically had performance issues that have caused our blog to load slowly.  Disqus recently acknowledged that they are having some significant problems.  Despite my fondness for Disqus, we will be uninstalling it from ImpactWatch this week and go back to Wordpress comments, with Backtype for tweetbacks (see below). 

I’ll probably loop back on Disqus in a few months and see if they’ve gotten their act together.  At this point, I simply can’t recommend the service.

Backtype

Last week, we gave Backtype Connect a try here on The Bivings Report.  The installation of the plugin went smoothly and tweetbacks started showing up pretty much immediately.  While the service definitely misses some tweets (probably due to people using some obscure URL shortening services), it seems to capture around 90% of relevant tweets.  It is definitely the best and most consistent of the tweetback services I have looked at and would be the one I would recommend at this point.

Note that I did not look at Tweetbacks by Yoast or Intense Debate, which is a service similar to Disqus that includes tweetback functionality.  If you have used these plugins, please post about your experience in the comments sections.  Please post if you think there is another service I should look at. 

Anyone that has done a lot of work in Drupal knows what a complete pain it is to upgrade from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6.  The change was dramatic, and many vital Drupal 5 modules still haven’t been upgraded to work in Drupal 6.  For many sites, going from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 isn’t so much an upgrade as a rebuild. 

Given this, it is sort of amusing that Drupal’s flagship website, www.drupal.org, is down today for maintenance as they upgrade from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 a full year after the release of Drupal 6.  I guess it really is as hard of an upgrade as it seems.

A few weeks ago we unveiled our favorite WordPress plugins. Drupal is another popular CMS platform we utilize here at Bivings. Here's a list of favorite modules we've compiled for it as well. And as always, feel free to signup and contribute to our wiki. (more…)

Almost all the sites we build at The Bivings Group these days use Content Management Systems (we usually use Drupal or Wordpress).  However, we do occasionally build old fashioned static sites when we know a site isn’t going to be updated that often and/or it is design heavy and we’ll be charged with managing it.  SEOMoz has a great chart up showing the decision tree people should use in deciding whether they need a CMS or not.  The chart is embedded below and I think it pretty much nails the questions people should be asking.

Many of our readers are well aware that we use WordPress as the CMS platform for a number of our clientele. We thus thought it would be fun to compile a list of our favorite WordPress plugins. (more…)

The Bivings Report is built in Wordpress, which comes with a robust commenting system out of the box. Due to this, I’ve very rarely looked at third party commenting systems like Haloscan. I haven’t really had a comment problem so there was no need to experiment with these third party tools.

But I recently set up a personal blog on Tumblr, which does not have commenting built in due to its reliance on reblogging instead (which is cool). I wanted people to be able to comment on my blog so I spent the ten minutes it takes to integrate Tumblr with the third-party tool Disqus. (Check out Fred Wilson (A VC) or Dave Winer’s blog for good examples of the tool in action).

Here is a quick breakdown of what I see as the pros and cons of Disqus after playing with it for a few months: (more…)

Version 6 of the open source Content Management System, Drupal, was released last week. We are really excited about this release, as we specialize in Drupal and have been playing with the beta releases of this version for many months now. Version 6 represents a significant step forward for Drupal. You can see a breakdown of all the new features here.

Since The Bivings Group builds a lot of websites that feature multiple languages, we are particularly excited by advances in Drupal’s language support. In previous versions of Drupal, to run websites in multiple languages you pretty much had to hack into the Drupal code and make it work using duct tape. It wasn’t pretty. Drupal 6 is the first release to natively handle multiple languages. The new release allows for:

• On the fly creation of multiple versions of the site in different language, including custom URLs.
• The ability for site visitors to set language preferences themselves, so they can control what language the site is in when visiting.
• Support for both left to right and right to left languages out of the box.
• Most importantly, the ability to manage pieces of content in multiple languages.

This last point is particularly important. Below is a quick breakdown of how this works with screenshots taking from a video demo by birdmanx35.

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The Future of Web Apps Conference will be held on the East coast for this first time ever this year, hitting the beaches of sunny Miami February 28th. It’ll be interesting to follow the developments that emerge from this year’s event. Speakers and participants are slated to discuss everything from startups to social networks.

Also on the agenda is a “Launch a web app in 40 minutes” feature, which will be led by a moderated panel of some of the smartest web developers.  You can vote for what kind of application the panel will attempt to assemble through TechCrunch.

Wordpress and Google will be represented among the 14 speakers confirmed thus far. Various workshops will also be available for those in attendance, including a “Making Money From Your App” session.

The Future of Web Apps Conference comes to a close March first.

My favorite SEO blogger, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz in Seattle, has an excellent post titled “Choosing the Right CMS Platform for Your Website (from an SEO perspective).” It is about various aspects of SEO to consider when choosing a content management system (CMS) to build a site. 

Instead of doing a comparison and contrast between different systems like Drupal and Wordpress; Rand provides 12 issues to consider. These issues revolve around the ability of a site owner to control various design elements that search engines consider when assessing a site.  These issues range from page title tags to CSS.

It is worth reading.  Other than SEO, what are important issues you consider when selecting a CMS?

I became aware of the term tumblelog around a year ago and have been running across examples of tumblelogs with greater and greater frequency lately. According to Wikipedia, a tumblelog “is a variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary.” This site has a list of examples.

After circling around the concept for awhile, I set up a test tumblelog for myself using the Tumblr service. Here are my impressions of tumblelogging generally and Tumblr specifically:

Things I Like

(1) The interface is dead simple and slick. As you’ll see from the screenshot below, all you do is click on the content type you want to post and your off.

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Our post a few weeks back about when to use Drupal and Wordpress generated a pretty good discussion in the comments and on other websites. Below are the best questions/comments and our responses.

(1) Amnon - Drupal Israel: “Did you notice any performance difference between the systems?”

Considering the functionality both of them possess and what both the platforms are trying to accomplish, we have found Wordpress is more resource intensive then Drupal. By default, Wordpress makes a ton of database queries and has no built-in caching. Drupal has caching out of the box. Poorly optimized Wordpress sites have actually become a sort of running joke on Digg, where Wordpress site after site that appears on the Digg homepage goes down within a few minutes due to overwhelmed database servers. However, those with a bit of experience can run Wordpress efficiently by using the WP-Cache plug-in and by optimizing your hosting set up. In addition, the brand new Wordpress 2.3 release supposedly includes some serious speed improvements. We are testing the new release now.

In addition, when implementing both Wordpress and Drupal you should be conservative in the plug-ins you use, as they can cause performance problems. This has been less of an issue for us in Drupal, mostly because Drupal has most of the functionality we need out of the box and we haven’t had to install a ton of plug-ins. (more…)

In my article last week on Wordpress vs Drupal, I gave some examples of sites built using those tools. Frankly, most of the examples I gave were sites we’d worked on. I figured I’d loop back and give examples of some exceptional sites I’ve come across (and didn’t work on) using each toolset. The goal is to show just how far you can push things using Drupal and Wordpress.

Drupal

(1) New York Observer

A full on newspaper website built using Drupal. (more…)

At this point, nearly all of the websites we build at The Bivings Group are either in Wordpress or Drupal. Sure, we build custom applications on occasion and sometimes do Flash work that really doesn’t fit in a Content Management System. But mostly we use Wordpress and Drupal.

Both are fantastic open source blogging platforms/content management systems with robust user communities. Both systems have their strengths and weaknesses. They are great alternatives to closed, paid platforms and much more cost effective than custom builds. As a web development shop, using Drupal and/or Wordpress allows us to focus our energies on design and strategy as opposed to reinventing the content management wheel.

After implementing a variety sites using both Wordpress and Drupal over the years, we’ve sort of developed our own unwritten rules as to when to use each platform.

Single Person / Group Blog (Use Wordpress)

If you are building a straight on single person or group blog, I think Wordpress is the way to go. It has all the base functionality you need built in and a robust set of plug-ins if you need to add on. The admin interface is dead simple - anyone with basic computer knowledge can master it in a few minutes. The install of the software is also simple and the templating system is not difficult to master.

Anything you want to do in Wordpress, you can also do in Drupal. But Drupal is more complicated from a design/install perspective, and has tons of features you’d end up turning off/not using for something simple like this.

A good example of a blog like built using Wordpress is our modest blog, The Bivings Report.

Blog Community (Use Drupal)

At a certain point your simple blog sort of crosses a line and becomes a blog community. Here are the things I look for:

• In some cases you are going to want people to navigate directly to an authors blog instead of the main page of the overall blog.
• Your blog has 10+ authors.
• There is the possibility that your commenters may themselves become contributors.

You can accomplish these goals by extending Wordpress. You can also use Wordpress Mu, which a community-version of Wordpress that we don’t think is quite ready for prime time. However, these kinds of sites are pretty much the reason Drupal exists. All the community-based features you need are available right away upon setup with little tinkering required.

A good example of a blog community is TechPresident, which we had nothing to do with building.

Blog Driven Website (Use Wordpress)

With its pages section and various plugins, Wordpress can be used as a full on Content Management System for blog-based websites. Lots of companies (including us) long ago abandoned the old fashioned press release and use blogs as their primary content delivery mechanism. Assuming your overall templating system on the site is pretty straight forward and you don’t have hundreds of pages, Wordpress works perfectly well for these types of sites.

Once again, Drupal can accomplish the same thing but it is a little more complicated to deal with and the admin interface is a little more complicated. It is sort of like driving a Ferrari in bumper to bumper traffic - you will get from point A to point B but you’d ultimately be better off weaving through traffic on a motorcycle.

The Washington Area Women’s Foundation is a good example of a Wordpress-based site that we built. In addition to having all the content editable through Wordpress, we also built a few databases as custom plug-ins.

Full Featured Website (Use Drupal)

At certain points, a site simply becomes too big for it to be sufficiently managed using Wordpress. If you find yourself bumping against any of the following scenarios, you should probably be using Drupal:

• If you have multiple dynamic content types (press releases, news articles, blog posts, etc.). Drupal is great at allowing you to create this stuff on the fly, with Wordpress you are hacking things together.
• If your site has more than a two template design structure (homepage and second levels).
• If you have numerous content blocks on the homepage or in sidebars that you will be editing frequently. Drupal’s block system is great at this kind of stuff.
• If you are trying to start small and expect your site to add tons of features/content moving forward.

We built a site for Monsanto Spain that uses Drupal as a full on Content Management System. This is a good example of this kind of website.