As frequent readers of our blog know, The Bivings Group specializes in building websites using the content management platform Drupal.  Given this focus, we’re really excited that the premier Drupal unconference, DrupalCon, will be taking place right in our back yard this year (Washington, DC) in early March.  We’ll be sending a nice contingent to the conference, and are looking forward to meeting and learning from other Drupal developers. 

In addition to attending, we have also submitted a session idea.  Our proposed session is titled “How To Build a Multi-Lingual Website in Drupal” and will focus on what we learned building the International Journalists Network, an ambitious website that runs concurrently in five languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Farsi and Arabic).  The core development team that built the site will be running the session. 

Anyway, vote for our panel if the topic strikes your fancy.  And be sure to say hello if you will be attending.

The Bivings Gorup recently launched what is easily, as far as we are aware, one of the most advanced multilingual sites made in Drupal ever built. The International Journalists’ Network, or IJNet can be seen here: www.ijnet.org. The website, built for the non-profit organization International Center For Journalists (ICFJ), leverages Drupal’s built in multilingual capabilities together with a number of custom fixes and changes.

Key challenges included:

• Creating a flexible page layout interface that allowed site administrators to easily create and customize sections in both left and right columns, giving them new colors, any kind of custom or dynamic content, as well as being able to define their own section colors.
• Having full-featured mutilingual social elements on the site, including user profiles, inter-user messaging, user networking, user network activity feeds, user comment posting, user article posting, and many other dynamic social elements.
• Enabling users to easily view the site in right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Persian.
• Creating custom displays of the site for low resolution monitors.
• Creating a platform suitable for managing mutliple mailing lists for use with third party mail systems.
• Allowing the client to easily add new languages to the platform when desired.

The International Center For Journalists administers IJNet and creates its content in five different languages, and counting…

Take a look at the site at www.ijnet.org and let us know what you think!

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.

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?

Yesterday The Bivings Group launched our latest client site Living Conversations, a community-based website for breast cancer survivors. The site encourages survivors to submit their stories via video and the written word as a way of providing strength and support to anyone coping with the disease. We’re happy of the way the site turned out, and to be associated with such a cool organization.

Working on the site also gave us the chance to try out a few things we hadn’t attempted before. Given that, I figured I’d give a little look under the hood and explain how the site was constructed.

The site is built using using the open source Content Management System Drupal. As mentioned previously, we pretty much build all our website these days in Drupal or Wordpress. We chose to use Drupal for this site due to the community features that were required and the varied content types on the site. We also wanted to leave the Living Conversations folks with the ability to quickly expand the functionality on the site should they choose to.

Working from Drupal, we added a great deal of additional functionality to the site through a combination of custom coding and the use of Drupal modules and plugins. Here is the breakdown of the ones we used:

(1) Video Uploading. A central aim of Living Conversations is to get breast cancer survivors to tell their stories via video. This required us to develop a way for users to upload videos to the site and then to display dynamically in various spots on Living Conversations. We did this using a combo of the Video module and a plugin that allows for the uploading of videos to a Blip.tv account. So basically users can upload a video on Living Conversations and it will FTP directly into their Blip account and show up on the site. Cool stuff.

Note that the Video module in Drupal is very easy to use. If you want to use the Blip.tv upload plugin, you are going to need to have some developers around as it is a bit tricky.

(2) Content Rating. The site allows registered users to rate content using a five point start system. This was implemented using Voting API as the backend and Voting to control the methodology used for the rating on the frontend. They work together.

(3) User Profiles. Out of the box, Drupal has a powerful Profile module built in. This allows registered users to create profiles on the site. Administrators to add just about any fields they want to capture to this profile field. We supplemented this with Buddy List, which allows users to add other users as contacts and track their activities on the site.

Those are the big ones. We also used Flag Content and Syndication to add some minor functionality to the site.

Anyway, check out www.livingconversations.com if you get a chance. Let us know what you think in the comments.