Drupal for publishers
Article/Recipe/Site Search
Very intuitive advanced On-Site Search functions: It is very important that we give users the ability to search through Recipes and Articles with great ease but without constantly wading through irrelevant results based on the keywords they enter.
Advanced Faceted Search: We will implement an Advanced Faceted Search feature that will allow user to explore the content of the website and find exactly what they are searching for while being shown additional relevant data based on their search.
- The important part of the search will be the ability to add weighted priorities to certain elements of these Recipes and Articles which will be used as key tags for searches, thereby avoiding the situation where a user searches for a generic term and instead of reaching the relevant recipe or article they are looking for, is overwhelmed by any and all data containing something similar to the term they have searched for. (Think of the “Bing” commercials on television…though I am not advocating Bing as a primary search engine)
Content Publishing, User Roles and Ease of Use
One of the great benefits of Drupal is while there are many options and thousands of features that can be turned on, they can also be turned off or modified very easily based on User Permissions.
User Roles: With drupal we can create Custom User permissions based on User Groups or Roles, such as Staff, Contributor, Publisher, Editor, Moderator, Admin etc. Through this we can customize exactly what a User will have access to when they login to the website. This means that a solo controbutor may only have to ability to login to the website and create one type of content such as a “Recipe” within this recipe creation they may only have the ability to give the recipe a name, list the ingredients and the preparation instruction, save and send the recipe to an Approval Queue.
Approval Queue – We can implement an Approval Queue for all articles or recipes of a specific content type. This means that once a Contributor enters an article it will be submitted to a queue which can then later be reviewed by an Editor level user. Once the Editor reviews the article they can either Approve the article and Publish it to the website or they can contact the author of the article for clarification and additional review.
This creates an Easy-to-Use system of Content Publishing, Editing and Archival. Users will only see the fields to fill out that they have the ability to see. Drupal can build a very in-depth Content Construction system with a myriad of fields and entries for every kind of content imaginable and then whittle down the submissions for a very individual user experience.
Multi Site Functionality
· Drupal can setup a Multi-Site Database which can run all three websites at once with the ability to add more as the need arises. Each website will have an individual Domain name and their own areas of the Database but the best part is that they can share information between them. This means that if you are on the Spry site as an Administrative user, you can publish a recipe to 1, 2, or all 3 of the website at once from one spot.
Individual Site Administration
· While all of these websites will be connected, it is also possible to set user administration restrictions based on each individual website, so one user may have access to create content on Spry while having no access at all on the other two websites, or perhaps on Spry they can create recipes as well as create recipes on Relish, but on Spry they can have access to an extra field in the recipe that they can fill out that is not available on Relish, Drupal can do all of this seamlessly.
URL Aliasing for SEO performance
· SEO performance is a very important part of marketing your website and of all the SEO boosts that Drupal has built in, one of the most fundamental abilities is it’s URL Aliasing system. Currently on the websites, articles are given url’s such as “article/41839.html” but Drupal can completely optimize this with the full title of the article in the URL window “article/biking-is-good-for-your-health” These kinds of changes can dramatically increase Search Engine Performance, combined with Drupal’s vast list of other search engine performance enhancements such as instantaneous xml sitemap submission, page title abilities, keyword tagging and database schema, Drupal websites tend to outperform every other CMS framework in search engine ranking time and time again.
Specific Layout Building, Content Priority and Placement specification
· We understand that the layout of your website is reflected by the importance of the content you are placing on your front and subpages. Drupal gives us the ability to customize regions of your website to accept different forms of content by their level of importance. Think of the inverted pyramid, if you have a very juicy article you may want it on the top of the front page specifically and perhaps even in the slideshow at the #1 spot as well, while less important content gets dropped to the bottom of the page. We can allow you to easily distinguish which content gets placed in exactly which region of your website, giving you full control of the entire look and feel of your Front page without having to contour your content to fit in only the specifically mandated areas. You can move Content Around, Move Images around, Move content around a simply as a drag-and-drop interface or by tagging specific content to go into specific regions. We can make it as advanced or as simple to control as you want.
Commenting and Community Profiling
· Drupal is built on community and as such places a very high standard on community development. With a community of developers in the tens of thousands from every continent in the world, Drupal has to have robust community features that can support the amount of interaction that is required to sustain such a beast. Drupal can be used to enable Commenting on Articles and Recipes, submit recipes, build Profiles, connect with Friends, send messages, sign up for newsletters or simply distinguish what specific areas of the website you are most interested in and follow articles related to those sections.
Drupal API’s
· Drupal also has the ability to communicate with an array of API’s (Interspire included) allowing you to integrate your Newsletter systems with your Users. This means that users can not only just sign up for your newsletter, they can also define which specific newsletters they would like to receive, allowing you to customize your message to individual user groups based on their interests. This can increase your newsletter impact exponentially.
Additional Notes
· Video and Photo Gallery systems are also very well rounded and a much deeper look would need to be taken at your current database structure for content migration and to make sure that we have not overlooked anything. It is very important to get the plan right before we send it to press and we take this very seriously.
Please let us know if there are any items we have overlooked or if there are any functionalities you are wondering if Drupal can handle, though with Drupal’s flexibility and community, there are few tasks that Drupal cannot take down.