Drupal for single hierarchy corporate website

We needed a content management system (CMS) for a website at work for 3 reasons:

• So the developers could be out of the content maintenance loop.
• So the developers could be out of the content maintenance loop.
• So the developers could be out of the content maintenance loop.

I remember when I first started web development years ago (gosh, has it been 10 years already?), that the “web guy” was called upon to make every little edit to the website. It could be a typo, a broken link, or an add-on to an existing application. Obviously, some of these things are not like the others. Fixing typos and broken links shouldn’t really be done by the programmers. They’re making too much money to deal with such minor issues. The people in charge of creating that content should be in charge of that stuff (ie, the marketing people).

There are a lot of companies where this is still the norm, the web development folks have to take care of a lot of minor issues like this. My current company was like that. But I’m trying to change the culture there. I’m trying to make the content creators responsible for the content and the programmers responsible for the programming. Enter stage left… use of a CMS for our new website.

After looking at a bunch of open source CMS apps (in PHP if you please) and also a handful of commercial CMS apps, I’ve come to the conclusion that CMS apps suck. ;-) No, really they do. Well, it’s not that they suck, it’s that you are never going to find one CMS that does every single thing that you want it to do. You’re just not. So give up now. I did.

So instead, putting my open source hat on, I tried to find the CMS that looked to be the most extensible or hackable. Drupal won this round hands down. There aren’t a lot of of examples out there about using Drupal for a fairly static corporate website, so I had to create some new modules to do things that I wanted but all in all the coding on the project went very quickly and we launched a successful site. I’ll be posting a few things that we learned along the way about using Drupal in this way in subsequent entries.

But for now, just know that we did keep the developers out of the content maintenance loop. And if you have any specific questions about the process, just holler.

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All your google are belong to us

I'm a google-whore. I freely admit this. I use a ton of their tools. Gmail. Calendar. The personalized search home page complete with widgets (or whatever google calls them, probably googets). Yahoo has the same tools and Ask.com is catching up with some neat stuff but still, google rules. Their tools are just dead simple to use. However, today I realized that their Search History tool is now saving my data for all of the following searches:

• Web
• Images
• News
• Froogle
• Video
• Maps
• Music

That concerns me. Not so much the web stuff because I routinely go in there and clean up the search history. I do this not because I'm searching things that I don't want anyone to know about, but more because I like my search history to revolve around my professional searching on programming and whatnot. It's easier and faster to find things in there that way (note to google, should let users tag their searched and clicked items). What concerns me though is the map history. I've already become anal enough that I don't use my exact address when looking to get driving directions somewhere. I use my neighbors down the street. But now my neighbors address is stored in there. And now when I bring up my contacts in gmail, I can get a map to my friends and relatives houses, but of course then their addresses are in the search history too. I worry about this being some kind of junk mail magnet in the future. Or worse, some kind of google as big brother scenario where they know everything about you and everywhere you go. I may have to rethink my life as a google-whore and my utter addiction to their tools.

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Brake lights with 5 bars

I've been stuck in traffic while driving a lot lately.  Why don't car brake lights show how hard someone is braking?  It seems to me if we standardized on a size of brake light that could go on the back of every vehicle, that we could have 5 bars on it.  When the driver is braking hard, all 5 bars would be lit, when breaking moderately, only 3 bars would be lit, and when just tapping the brakes, only one bar would be lit. Maybe I'm just a sucker for standards like this.... but this idea would save everyone from having to evaluate the distance and speed of multiple cars while in stop and go traffic and would probably prevent a lot of minor accidents.  Somebody should start working on this.  

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