Watch the introductions for The Pickens Plan’s Heather Lauer and The Bivings Group’s Todd Zeigler during their panel discussion at the Personal Democracy Forum conference this week.
Entrepeneur Mark Goldenson wrote a great article in Venturebeat last week on the lessons he learned working on his failed startup, PlayCafe. This passage resonated with me:
3. Know when to value speed vs. stability. Another reason PlayCafe’s complexity hurt us is that developing good content and technology simultaneously required too much time. We tried to make each deep and stable — important, we thought, given our live nature — but we were too slow to iterate in a novelty- and entertainment-based business.
A metaphor I like is that a chess novice can defeat a master if moving twice each round. This generally increases bugs and offends perfectionists, but I agree with Reid Hoffman that if you review your first site version and don’t feel embarrassment, you spent too much time on it.
This is a lesson that applies to all web development work. Way, way too many organizations tend to turn a web development project into a six to twelve month process, with delays resulting from months of arguments about font choices or waiting on content that sounds good in theory, but no one has time or energy to write.
In almost all cases, organizations are better off scaling back their initial requirements in order to get something up quickly so they can start making an impact now. As long as the initial site is built in a flexible platform like Drupal, it should be relatively painless to then launch iterative improvements to the site over time.
A website is not a print brochure. Nothing is being sent to the printer and a website isn’t something that should ever be seen as finished.
“The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
-Voltaire
In February we launched brand new, upgraded, and comprehensively re-designed versions of The Personal Democracy Forum’s sibling websites, personaldemocracy.com and techpresident.com.
There are tens of new features and offerings, but highlights include:
PdF Marketplace : a commercial bulletin board for the poli-tech community. Job postings, domain sales, resumes, web services — all have a place here for exposure to a highly targeted audience.
The Pdf Network : The Forum’s new membership program, providing insider access to key poli-tech thought leaders, discounts on conference attendance, networking, and advance notice on impending developments in the field. (Bonus: a subscription to one of several magazines is included in your membership.)
VoteVid : This is techPresident’s video forum, on which anyone can propose, share, and vote on online political videos.
Topics : The content produced by PdF’s magnificent stable of bloggers is now drawn directly into a set of seven verticals (eGovt, Fundraising, Mobile, Advertising, Video, Strategy and Cool Stuff)
Ratings and Metrics : blog posts are now rate-able through an AJAX-based five-star ranking system, and posts can be sorted by such metrics as “Most Emailed ” and “Most Read “.
Charts: PdF has added charts set to visually track such developing phenomena as the 2012 GOP presidential field, and the latest rankings of key political figures in terms of their Technorati rankings as well as the number of friends each has accumulated on Facebook.
Calendar : a listing of all of the most important and groundbreaking upcoming events as determined by the PdF editorial team.
Advocacy : a centralized grouping of the key players in political advocacy, along with profiles of each.
The reaction has been overwhelmingly welcoming and positive thus far, but have a look for yourself. Visit the site , create your free or paid membership , subscribe to the blog, learn about the fast-approaching 2009 PdF Conference . Then, let us know what you think.
I attended DrupalCon last week, and the various speakers pointed to a variety of Drupal resources that are of interest to Drupal users of all skills sets. Following is a breakdown of the various resources speakers at the conference crecommended.
For the beginners who know very little if anything about Systems, Frameworks, API’s and are only interested in front end layout design, Drupal Developer and speaker Addison Berry has compiled a list of handy tools that will allow you to dive into Drupal theming through CSS and HTML styling.
I attended Drupalcon last week, which is a bi-annual Drupal conference for developers, themers and business development types like myself. I had a great time, so here are some quick thoughts on the conference.
(1) Drupal people are really nice. Conversations came easily and people are willing to share. In his presentation, Kyle Williams mentioned that the reason he got into Drupal was because the community was so supportive and positive. He’s right.
(2) Multiple people wondered aloud why the Drupal alien logo has to be so scary (see alien in upper right).
(3) There were few Republicans at Drupalcon. David Cohn wrote a great article a few months back about how Drupal has helped power the progressive movement. Based on the demographics of the folks at the conference and the sites showcased, Drupal is still being used much more aggressively by left leaning organizations than those on the right.
(4) Anyone that has used Drupal for any period of time knows how dramatic the changes are when a new version is released. There are tons of sites out there still running on Drupal 4 and 5 due to how hard it is to upgrade. In talking to folks at the conference, that really is by design. The Drupal community is focused on pushing the code forward. If the cost of progress is problems with backward compatibility, so be it. This is in stark contrast to packages like Wordpress that worry much more about relatively easy upgrades.
(5) In his presentation, Neil Giarratana mentioned that one advantage of Drupal is that tons can be accomplished through configuration using administrative tools as opposed to through customization, which inevitably involves hard core developers. Configuration is relatively easy and cost effective while customizations are hard and expensive. This has been my experience as well, so it was nice to have Neil articulate the divide so well.
(6) Neil also had a good quote, saying that Drupal is free in the same way a puppy is free. By the time you feed it, take it to the vet, etc. it actually ends up being expensive. This is true of all content management systems, but I think it is important for people who launch Drupal sites to account for ongoing upgrades and maintenance. One of the great things about Drupal is that it is relatively easy to make changes and the development never real ends. Companies should plan for that when they launch sites.
(7) On the negative side, the sessions at the conference were hit or miss, more so than at any conference I’ve been to before. I saw a few sessions that were among the best I’ve seen at any conference and a couple I literally got nothing out of despite being interested in the topic. As someone who submitted a panel idea that wasn’t accepted, the inconsistency got me wondering about how the sessions were selected. My guess is that it was a bit of a hybrid between votes and editorial process.
(8) On the positive side, Drupalcon was the first conference I’ve been to with a fooseball table.
(9) If you were on a PC, the wifi at the conference was spotty, particularly if you are on Vista. If you were on a Mac, it seemed to work fine. The Drupal community is definitely Mac friendly, so this was probably some sort of conspiracy.
(10) I saw a lot of examples of great Drupal work at the conference, but I would put our work up there with anybody’s. I’m really proud of the work my Bivings co-workers have done on complex Drupal sites like IJNet, Personal Democracy Forum, Techpresident and Wild Australia.
When I headed to DrupalCon this week, I thought it would be strange to attend a talk called "Why Drupal Sucks", but that's exactly the title of James Walker's talk this morning about Drupal and all that's wrong with it.
Walker starts off by talking about some of the great things about Drupal. But in a comedic style, he targets some of the most often complaints regarding the open source platform. He focuses on usability, the fact that Drupal tries to be all things to all people, and that it's nearly impossible for a newbie to effectively involve themselves in the community with ease.
A lot of what he takes issue with is well known. Core has 30 modules, many of which are difficult to use or impossible to configure. Every Drupal developer knows the phrase "there's a module for that!" and they use it religiously. The problem is that average, ordinary folks don't want to find the module for that - they just want it to work.
He highlights a lot of great things about Drupal as well - the community, the level of involvement, the fact that there are 1,400 people at Drupalcon. As someone relatively new to Drupal, but a seasoned PHP developer, this was a great overview.
Walker ends his talk by saying "Drupal sucks at being a product so we should become a movement." I don't entirely support his argument but I appreciate the sentiment. In all, Walker provides some great things for the community to consider, and makes some important points about the direction Drupal is going.
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.
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.
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.
The Bivings Report (TBR) is a source of news, insight, research and analysis on the web-based communications industry. TBR content is posted, created and managed by internet strategists, media/communications analysts, web developers, designers and programmers, all of whom are employees of The Bivings Group.
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