Drupal

Bia Brazil and Margarita fitness wear are two of the top designer ladies gym wear specialists from Brazil. We have been lucky enough to work with one of an exclusive number of retailers in the UK, Daisy Fitness, to produce a website to show their range of stylish workout wear.

The fitness wear from both Bia Brazil and Margarita are made form Supplex® by DuPont, the latest technical fabric to be used in workout wear. Daisy Fitness were eager to have an ecommerce website that displayed the quality and style of these designers, we hope you enjoy the result.

When building a Drupal website it's important to get the basic site configuration right to help in everything from SEO to Usability.

Putting these basics in place will make your site load faster and avoid a potential increase in your bounce rate. A well oiled machine will make for a smooth running site and a good experience for visitors.

Drupal is a very powerful CMS with many core and contributed modules, these are just some of the things your should do, if you think there are others do add a comment ;o)

Blog comments are a hot topic at the moment and something we're constantly reviewing. Since Matt Cutts, at SMX Advanced, announced the 'nofollow tag' no longer passes pagerank, the blogging and more importantly the SEO community has been discussing the merits of page rank sculpting.

Barry Welford's post, Blog Comments and Google, gives a great run down of the situation and the merits of allowing comments on your blog.

We, at Makak Media, are interested in how a blog aids your SEO efforts and attracts visitors to the site but at the same time we're also mindful that this blog is primarily there for the reader. It's not all about getting visitors and gaining page ranking if your content isn't of quality and your readers can't interact.

Read Only Comments

Securing your ecommerce website is a top priority to give customers confidence in purchasing from your store.

You may have payment options such as offsite or onsite payments. If you're using an offsite payment method, such as PayPal, customers are sent to an external site to complete checkout and so security issues are handled by PayPal themselves.

What about if you're using onsite payment methods, what do you need to do to secure the payment page?

The first thing you'll need to do is check your hosting package came with an SSL Certificate. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encrypts critical data, such as credit card details, providing security and data integrity for communications over networks such as the Internet.

If you're serious about Drupal and developing your site further you should be looking at using the CCK and Views modules. These two modules are the basis for most sites we build and provide great functionality that can take your site up a level.

Luckily for you, the great people at Lullabot have released two Free Drupal CCK & Views Video Chapters from the Lullabot Learning Series, to give you a flavour of the modules and their approach to teaching.

The Content Construction Kit (CCK) module allows you to add custom fields to nodes using a web browser. A great way to expand your content types beyond the standard page and story supplied in core.

The Views module provides a flexible method for Drupal site designers to control how lists and tables of content (nodes in Views 1, almost anything in Views 2) are presented.

I recently visited a company in Bromley to talk about a CMS website project and naturally got talking about their current Content Management System. Safe to say I was surprised by the relative complexity of their CMS.

When it comes to editing content, you want the end user to feel in control and at ease with the process. This particular firm felt completely the opposite and were a bit disillusioned at the thought of finding a new CMS that would make life easier for them.

This is when we discussed the open source Content Management System Drupal and how my clients have been happy with its' day-to-day operation.

CMS Simplicity

When it comes to managing a website you need a system that is not only intuitive but inspires confidence. Many of my clients are by no means technically minded so the CMS needs to provide them with the tools to create and edit content within a few clicks.

When building your website you need to take into consideration at some point in the future someone will mistype a url or find an old link that doesn't have a redirect assigned to it.

At this point the user will be directed to your 404 Page not found. This is a standard page that is set up by your internet service provider (ISP) or comes with your CMS eg Drupal.

This is where most sites let down their visitors as the standard 404 page is a bit of a let down. No real content for you find out where you should have been directed and sometimes not even any navigation!

Drupal is our Content Management System (CMS) of choice and with its' popularity growing ever stronger here's a list of tutorial sites we've put together for you.

The flexibility of Drupal is one of its' greatest assets and with modules galore to extend it there are many tutorials out there to help you along the way.

You'll find below a list of websites and blogs chock full of Drupal tutorials, videos and tips to help you get the most out of the CMS.

Spam is a huge problem for anyone running a blog but after 9 ½ weeks of using Mollom I'm hot under the collar for this great looking software!

Mollom is great for stopping unwanted content from being published on your website. I use it for my comments and contact form but you could use it for blog posts, registration forms you name it.

Mollom is really hot on spam bots and since activating it I've saved so much time, instead of moderating all my comments I let Mollom do the work for me. It's by no means perfect but it sure does stop a lot of spam getting through.

I was inspired both to try Mollom on my Drupal (plugins for Wordpress and Joomla available) site in the first place, and then to write this piece, by Wim Mostrey's Mollom: 128 Days Later article.

A simple cost effective idea for schools, surely this won't happen! A great article by John Spencer over at ComputerWorldUK highlights an area where schools could save billions by using Open Source software.

If you're not familiar with Open Source software then a quick description would be that it's free to download and use in many different forms.

There's plenty of software out there for the office such as Google Apps that not just schools can take advantage of but office workers too.

This opportunity would also open up areas for students to really get their teeth into software and programming for free, something I would have loved. I can still see those old machine probably as powerful as a couple of calculators put together, those were the days!