InfoBeans has always believed that Drupal is a great CMS platform to work on. We have developed immense capabilities around Drupal and continue to support it as an advanced and highly customizable web CMS platform.

This year Drupalcon was organized at Chicago from March 7 to March 11. InfoBeans was a silver sponsor for this years Drupalcon.

Team InfoBeans had a great time at Drupalcon. Check out some pictures from this years event.

Drupal is a free software package that allows anyone to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Hundred thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power an endless variety of sites.

The latest weapon in the Drupals arsenal is the Drupal version 7. Drupal has come up with a exciting new backend and user interface that will have a jaw dropping effect on the users.

Here are a few features that make Drupal 7 better than its predecessors:

Setup:

Install profiles

Installing Drupal is still a simple process. The setup now includes 2 install profiles: one for a ready-to-go installation that enables most modules and lets you dive right into the action. The other profile is a minimal installation that only enables a few core modules and is geared towards people who wants to develop their own site from the ground up.

Administrating:

Admin menus and overlays

An immense effort was made to improve the Drupal administrative front end. In Drupal 7 you will notice a bunch of new useful features and many key differences in how your site works. At the top there is now a content menu with administative links. This menu is "stuck" to the top of the page and will move when scrolling. Admin links now display in an overlay over your main site. This feature helps separate your actual site from the admin sections and allows access to admin functions without ever having to navigate away from your currently loaded page.

Information architecture

Previous versions of Drupal contained ambiguous categorization for various tasks. Modules had a tendency to install themselves into various arbitrary categories which made configuration a confusing mess. This categorization has been improved so each task goes into a clear, accurate category like "content," "appearance," "people," etc. Hopefully this will help you find what you need more easily and aid in reducing the number of clicks you need to get from one task to another.

Dashboards and shortcuts

Dashboards are a new feature to Drupal 7. They are are fully configurable set of blocks that present various bits of pertinent info to the user such as the last 10 pieces of submitted content, lists of new or online users, and management links. Each user can tweak their own dashboard as they see fit so they have a one-stop overlay of any site information they desire. Shortcuts are simple commonly visited links that users can pin to the top menu (and also to the dashboard). On big, multi-admin sites its usefulness really comes into play if you have various admins that concertrate on specific parts of the site.

Content creation and editing

The new overlay system makes editing a breeze. All blocks and content can now be edited and saved in place. Those of you that used the "vertical tabs" module for previous versions will love the new Drupal default behavior of dealing with content options. Instead of endless lists of collapsible (or non-collapsible) fieldsets, all options are now tabbed for quick access. A similar set of options applies to block edit overlays as well.

Design and Development:

CCK Fields

Drupal's powerful content construction kit has finally been upgraded to a core module. CCK (now simply called "Fields") allows you to attach various pieces of information to a content type. You can then use pieces in your themes to do things like display an image or video, create a list of footnotes, or allow for different types of summary text for different pages of your site. Integration into core means that now every input box are treated in the same manner (where as before, some fields were CCK and some were not and thus had different display variables). This should make things remarkably easier for themers.

Regions

Previously, Drupal contained some features that were hard coded into design templates. Things like system messages and errors, help text, and even the main body content of the page were immobile in a template. Thankfully, version 7 now allows your site admins to move these pieces around just like you would with blocks. This is achieved via the block layout page.

Module settings

Older installations of Drupal didn't have hard rules regarding module settings or menu placements. Often times you had to do quite a bit of searching just to find the settings page for your modules, even frustratingly to find out that no settings page even existed. Thankfully, now all module settings, permissions, and help files can be accessed directly from the module list page.

Upgrades and module installation

Could this be the last time you'll have to use FTP? Drupal 7 allows updating of existing modules directly from your web interface and now you can install new modules from your admin section as well. Current settings allow for 2 options: input for the file URL (like from drupal.org), and also uploading from your computer hard drive.

We're pretty excited about all the new great features and improvements in this release of Drupal. You can read all the up to date news about Drupal 7 and its development community at Drupal's website.

 The iPad buzz at Folio 

The Folio:Show was buzz with excitement with all things iPad. There was hardly a person who was not interested in seeing how to put his/her publication on the iPad. And fast.

The iPad is such a beautiful product, and sales are proving this fact - 2 million sold in 2 months, that has become a reality for the publishing industry. Or maybe even a compulsion.

Yes, I am a big fan of the iPad. Just can't wait to get it out of the hands of whoever is playing with it at home and start my browsing and email. I think the iPad and devices like the iPad hold a great future. They need to be paid smart attention to.

Smart Attention

There is a reason why I added Smart as an adjective. Companies are scrambling head over heels to create their great iPad app and putting in stop gap arrangements for their CMS and other systems to support it. In this mad rush, many are ignoring the long term. We know the iPad, (when I refer to the iPad, I really refer to iPad and similar devices that are sure to crop up very soon) is here for the long term. Devices like these will rule and for all practical purposes, devices with a keyboard and a mouse will soon feature on the History Channel. 

What publishers need today is a long term content strategy for digital publishing on a whole range of devices, not just iPads. They need a comprehensive solution to the whole digital publishing conundrum.

My company is advising its clients to take this holistic approach and not a band aid kind of approach. If they fumble on this first step, it will be hard to recover and recreate the entire iPad experience without significant money and time loss. And then of course the loss of the brand and market share.

We are taking a step back and looking at this entire play with a comprehensive approach to solving the problem for a long term. We are asking our clients to look at 

• Their source of content, how they are feeding it into their CMS system
• Their CMS system itself - is it equipped to handle the next wave?
• The output that the CMS is generating - is it good enough only for the iPad? Can it be used for other devices? Can the output be dynamic enough to leverage the changing nature of content?
• Is the content easily discoverable for the range of devices we are dealing with today and will encounter tomorrow?

Check back for more on this whole digital publishing thing. Interesting times, requiring smart attention!

We had a great time at the folio show. Attendance was much better than last year, that is what the folks say. I was not there last year so can't say for sure.

My impression out of the show on the cms/ technology side is this. There is an overwhelming majority of publishers who are not satisfied with their CMS solution. About 90% of the people I talked to said they were not at all happy with their cms solution on these counts

1. Non unified
2. Non integrated
3. Does not support print to digital transformation
4. Have no clear roadmap for supporting digital devices going forward

This is what I see is the problem - people have been relying on out of the box solutions way too much. Each business is unique and each business has it's own set of challenges, opportunities and stake holders to deal with. If you are to run a successful business you need tools that acknowledge these unique situations and work with you understanding your environment.

Unless you are running a really tiny publishing business and using only one distribution channel to reach your audience - just print or just online, you cannot expect to survive the challenges and tap the opportunities that the new publishing era is throwing up.

There were opinions in the crowd that print is not dead. I agree. But at the same time, print is also not going to take your business far. If you do print only, you have to transform. Now!! 

And let me get this straight. I do not say you need to stop doing print. There is still money to be made. Question is - for how long? Print will be dead, at some point. We will not see paper after a certain day. I do not see my 7 year old son doing a lot of things on paper for a very long time to come. Great print offerings are just going to extend the eventuality. Someday, print will be dead and that day is not very far out in the future.

I have certain other observations for the digital devices people are so gung ho about. Will touch upon them in another post soon.

 InfoBeans has always believed that Drupal is a great CMS. We have developed immense capabilities around Drupal and continue to support it as an advanced and highly customizable web CMS platform.

Continuing our support for the Drupal community, we have pleasure in announcing that we are co sponsoring the Drupalcon event in San Francisco in April 2010.

Check out our sponsorship page at the Drupalcon event website - http://sf2010.drupal.org/sponsors/infobeans

We look forward to sharing our experiences with the Drupal community at Drupalcon 2010. Drop us a line if you are interested in a one to one discussion.

 So we have been able to move our corporate website to Drupal. It has been on the cards for a long time and our team got together to make it happen. Thanks to all who were involved - Amol, Prafful, Amit and their team.

Moving www.infobeans.com to Drupal was not something that we decided on a whim. We had some clear goals in mind.

• Making our website search engine friendly or SEO
• Providing flexibility to our non technical team to change our content easily and efficiently
• Create a knowledge repository that is easy to manage
• Hosting our own blogs (we were previously on wordpress) and therefore getting more control over templates, content blocks and features

We have not changed the design much, though there are some navigational elements that have been added. Another key feature is the integration of our twitter feed. Follow @infobeans on twitter to get the latest real time news on what's happening at InfoBeans.

Another addition is our mobile website. m.infobeans.com is now available on your mobile browser. This website is optimized to allow you to browse www.infobeans.com on your mobile phone/device.

With this changeover, we are hopeful of interacting a lot more closely with our online community.

Send in your feedback at sales@infobeans.com or comment below. We look forward to them!

When it comes to open source CMS, there are tons of options out there and two of the most popular ones happen to be Drupal and Joomla.

Amit Makhija, our senior project manager and web content management expert put out this document that helps us in making an informed decision. 

We are not recommending one over the other, but just trying to lay out some facts for both platforms so that people can make informed decisions on which implementation would be the best for a given situation.

Read on. Please do post in your comments.

Amit – thanks for putting this together.