Posted on June 19th, 2007 by Chris Abraham
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...Besides that it’s free, cool, powerful, and powers both my website and my corporate site, Abraham Harrison LLC, What I love about Drupal is that there are loads of very powerful modules one can easily implement with just a simple download, activation, and set up.
Modules can easily add some very exciting functionality to an online magazine or online community, including tightly-integrated features such as surveys, comments & comment approval, spell-check (for comments), announcement emails to registered users, avatars, bios, contributor blogs, calendars, RSVP/event management, classified ads, RSS feeds, automated daily content management (like comics or columns), flagging (to allow users to tag content – and submitted tags to be reviewed by editors), photo galleries, maps, viral Tell-A-Friend invites, job postings, e-commerce, Loves/Hates, movie reviews, social networking, forums, wikis, e-postcards, quizzes, “Similar Article†recommendations based on tags, and workflow management for moving articles through an editing and posting process.
Modules can easily add some very exciting functionality to an online magazine, including tightly-integrated features such as, in the example of Drupal:
- Comment abuse filter – checks for spam and help reduce administers nee
- Account reminder – resends an email to a user who has registered and has yet to sign in
- Account types – ability to compartmentalize user accounts based on “print subscriber†or “online subscriber†or “teacher†or whatever…
- Address book – tools for keeping an address book (may not be important here)
- AdSense – integration with Google AdWords and AdSense
- Survey / Advanced Poll – way of engaging with readers through polls and quizzes
- Advertisement – revenue management and ad management tools
- Affiliate tools – partner with affiliates to make added revenue
- Aggregation – seamlessly bring in other content, such as the feeds from other Latin sites and news sources
- Spell-check – help your citizen journalists with their spelling even before they submit
- Amazon Associates – Amazon associates affiliate connecting can help generate a little revenue when you recommends books to buy
- Announcement emails – sometimes, it is important to send alert and update and admin emails to everyone who is and has registered as a member of the site
- Audio – uploading MP3 files can be listene
- Content Auditing – there Quality Assurance of the site is key, especially when forging a path to Citizen Journalism. Auditors can either be staff but they can also be student-editors, which is an empowering
- Avatars and Gallery of Avatars – allow folks to get their online personality on with either a personal portrait or a canned avatar from a provided library
- Bio – allow each user to offer their personal bio that their friends and community can see
- Birthdays – tracking people’s birthday, both as the site owner (hey, we remembered your birthday!) or amongst the folks who are friends online. Online, people always want excuses to reach our and wishing someone a happy birthday is an excellent excuse
- Blogs and Bloggers – allow all your registered users, editors, and staff to keep their own blog and share a little but of their world – excellent tool for viral marketing
- Blogroll – the Internet an
- Bookmark Us – it is important to make sure that your magazine ties into social bookmarking services such as Facebook, MySpace, reddit, digg, del.icio.us, etc
- Scheduler / Calendar – maintaining a calendar of events is important – can be events but also submission deadlines, etc.
- Category – categorization is an essential way to help organize, find, and refer content, such as Health & Beauty, Sports, Cars,
- RSVP / Event and Invitation management (CiviCRM) – allows ways to organize communities around events, gatherings, and also money-collections, etc
- Classified Ads – the obvious classified ads module
- Clean Feeds – tool allows you to bring in rich text RSS feeds an
- Comment approval – opening comments to members really aids in developing community connections, investment, an
- Conference – there are tools that allow people to easily organize conferences
- Content moderator – it is important to allow your readership to become your community, but then it is also important to make sure that the content is hel
- Daily items (like comics) – there are ways to automate content, such as daily comics content and so forth
- Del.icio.us, reddit, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Twitter / and digg integration – social bookmarking is an essential of allowing and encouraging your visitors to share the love and help promote content easily and simply themselves, be it on a social bookmarking site such as del.icio.us or a social network such as Facebook
- Email Subscribe / Email newsletters – although comments and articles and site-based conversation are essential to building community, it is also important to make sure that there are opt-in ways of allowing you to ping and reach out to all of your users, to remin
- Event – Real-life events are part of the entire life of the magazine and any way you can better organize the event in collaboration with your community, the better
- Feedback – the entire experience revolves around a positive experience had by all, an
- Flag content – flagging content is an important feature to help your members and visitors to do their own real-time auditing of the consumer-generated content. Flags get sent to the administrator an
- Full-text search – search is one of the most important parts of navigating an online magazine
- Gallery – photos are an important way of bringing faces to names online. Users can uploa
- Glossary – a glossary can be a pretty great way to share very regional or emerging
- Google Maps – visual mash-ups with Google Maps allows readers to better understan
- Google Translate (Spanish) – localization is an important attribute. A Latin site needs to be able to do Spanish well.
- Guest book – allow people to leave some love behind in the form of guest books and notes
- Localizer & Internationalization – true internationalization allows a magazine to truly be global
- Interview – module allows easy integration of interviews in a easy-to-read format
- Tell a friend / Invite a friend – virals are essential, especially when it comes to never offering a visitor a dead-end. One of the exits include facilitating the introduction of new people into the community
- Jeopardy – tool for setting up Jeopardy like quizzes an
- Job search – this might be premature, but maybe this can include internship opportunities
- Legal – legalese is an important aspect of any web site, including Terms of Service (TOS) and Privacy statements
- E-commerce and PayPal –selling paper subscriptions is essential and making sure this is easy and integrated while also offering many varieties of payment choices
- Loves and Hates – this module allows registered users to explore their personal loves and hates and share them with their friends and learn all about each others loves and hates – this is an excellent way of allowing registered users to get to know and get to share with each other
- Site map /
- Review / Movie review – this module makes it simple for members to review movies and share it with other members
- Notify – email reminders and notifies allow registered users and visitors to receive update alerts via email, offering an effective way of keeping users updated when they’re away
- Social Network (Organic Groups) – one of the possible directions magazines can take is the direction of social networks: special interest groups, local community groups, city-based groups, or topic-based groups. Very powerful tool
- Opt-in – one of the best ways to prevent accusations of proffering spam is to make sure that all email outreaches to users and members are opt-in
- Message board (phorum, phpBB) – though traditional, old-tech, and oftentimes difficult to maintain, discussion forums are still powerful ways of connecting, idea-sharing, building intimacy an
- Wiki – Wikis are amazing, emergent tools for coming together to create a collaborative group resource, much like Wikipedia
- Photoblog – allowing users and members to bring their personal world and allows people to invest more of their own personal time, energy, and selves into the community
- Postcard – cute module to allow another viral marketing gimmick that will allow members and visitors to share the love with friends and family. Magazine cover photos, model photos, and photos of cool cars, can be appealing subject of postcards
- Premium content – module allows the administrator and editors to define which parts of the online magazine are free and open and which parts are restricte
- Print friendly page – Simple module allows all of the articles collected in the articles database to be printed onto paper without all the design clutter, all clean and well-formatted
- Questions and Answers – Q & A’s are an amazing way to triage questions that readers and members might have and maintaining all of those questions and your answers into a very strong database. QA’s are essential in order to create knowledge resources: ask once, answer many times
- Votes / Quiz – quizzes are fun ways to engage the community with opportunities for rewards, incentives, and prizes
- Quotes – quotes can include notable sayings from inspirational and historical quotes
- Similar Entries / Recommended Posts / Related content – based on tagging, this module suggests “if you like this article, you might like these†– never paint your reader into a corner or offer them a dead end. It is essential to make sure there is an attractive exit and recommended, related, and suggested content
- Staff bio – module that facilitates the creation of bio pages to better interact with the larger community. Sharing of your staff really makes people feel connecte
- Table of Contents – visitors to a website require any number of ways to access, browse, discover, and find content. ToC’s are an amazing way to allow people to access content via a more traditional, interactive, was of discovering content. Site navigation should not be dictated by the site owner as all visitors have different preference for how they find content: full-text search, search engines, categories, front page, related or suggested articles, and also a table of content
- Profanity filter – it is probably wise to make sure that people keep their language under control. Allowing folks to speak freely is as important as making sure people watch their mouths
- Workflow – at the end of the day, one of the most important aspects of the usability and sustainability of the site is based on decentralizing the tasks associated with producing, editing, and maintaining the site. Workflow aids the site production by allowing a distribution of tasks and responsibilities. Writers, editors, publishers, administrators, and other roles can be defined and easily implemented into the process of the site’s every day
Filed under: Application Development, CMS, Content Management Solution, Content Management System, Drupal, LAMP, Open Source, Open Source Applications
Loading ...
Leave a Reply