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Content Management Systems

Content Management System (CMS)

In general, a Content Management System (CMS) gives your organization the control to easily create, organize, publish and manage content on the Web site independently—without the need of specialized technical knowledge (or Acro Media, for that matter).

At the least, a CMS allows you to edit text in specific Web pages, commit the changes to your Web site and immediately publish them. More flexible systems lets you change even more: add entire pages, or tweak formatting and navigation. An enterprise CMS can accommodate business rules e.g. access/authorization controls, regulating who can enter select areas of the company portal, who may edit product pricing, or who can edit content submissions before publishing them online.

Retaining control over what gets published, when, and how affords these benefits:

  • Instantaneous delivery of fresh content to market e.g. immediately publish news, products and pricing.
  • Longevity and value: extend your site’s lifespan by years with a robust, scalable CMS.
  • Agility: PR can seize opportunities (and avoid pitfalls) in emerging markets and/or changing conditions.
  • Attractiveness: relevant content and fresh appearance attracts visitors and entices their return.
  • Quality control: controlled access levels for creation, editing, approval and publishing mean consistent brand management and lower risk of misrepresentation.
  • Freedom: banish the once all–powerful Webmaster.
  • Cost savings: skip outsourced content production, conversion and uploading
  • Flexibility: change, augment, respond, grow!
 

Drupal Content Management System

Drupal is a full-featured CMS suite with an extraordinary range of functionality, search engine friendliness and ability to be customized in nearly any way imaginable. Drupal allows an individual—or community of users—to easily organize, publish and manage a huge variety of content types on a Web site.

When Acro Media implements Drupal’s magic into your Web site, your investment pays for design, integration and customization—it’s not wasted on a license. Drupal delivers value that complements its superior functionality and flexibility: there are no per-copy or per-use fees. Ever.

Tens of thousands use Drupal daily for diverse Web site types. Drupal’s user base of 250,000 registered members includes IBM, NASA, NATO, Popular Science, Google, Sun Microsystems, Warner Brothers records, Amnesty International and Harvard University. It’s no surprise that, amongst stiff competition, Drupal won the Overall Open Source CMS Award for 2007 and 2008. (And, ahem, Acro Media designed the winning 2008 International Drupalcon logo—where the galaxy’s Drupal-heads converge.)

On the technical side, Drupal uses server-side PHP software to retrieve, add or update content from a MySQL database and dynamically generate Web pages to a LAMP based server. It delivers the content to a variety of standard Web formats (e.g. HTML, PHP) and is browser agnostic (yes, IE or Opera, FireFox or Chrome). It is open source software licensed under the GPL (General Public License) and requires no licensing fee.

Drupal boasts a large community of public supporters. To your additional benefit, a community of Drupal developers continually posts modules and enhancements to http://drupal.org, further extending its already impressive performance and functionality (please see below).

Default Drupal CMS
Acro Media’s default setup of Drupal CMS includes the implementation of the following features:
 

  • Content management—Administrators can add, edit and remove pages on your site. Acro Media builds fully customizable templates for proper use of CSS and page organization.
  • Search—A powerful internal site search system.
  • SEO friendly—Specifically indexable pages and ability for admin to optimize: Add/edit keywords. Edit page titles. META tags and META descriptions.
  • Plain English path names—No arcane code in the URL, just sensible text that helps search engines define the page (oh, and humans like this too).
  • Web form creation—Administration can create their own Web forms using the Web form builder.

 
Extra Features
The following features are available which we would be happy to implement any on a per-item basis, or leave them to your developers to set up. Features include:
 

  • Articles types for Unique Content—generally an introduction to the content will appear on a overview page, with links to the full content:
    • News/press releases.
    • Careers/job postings.
    • FAQs.
  • RSS feeds—Ability for users to receive new/updated content from the site. Users subscribe and get updates via their RSS aggregator as content is added/updated. The whole site can have a single RSS feed, or individual sections can have their own.
  • RSS news aggregator—This tool gathers articles, blogs, etc. from other sites and provides them to your Web site users.
  • Send to a Friend—Great for online word of mouth marketing, or word of mouse.
  • Image gallery manager—Set up online photo albums: create directories, fill with photos and upload them to your Web site.
  • Social bookmarking—A link will appear on article pages allowing members to submit a page of the site to Digg, Deli.cio.us, Reddit, etc.

 

Other Features

  • Collaborative authoring environments—Projects in which authorized contributors can jointly create a “book” (e.g. manuals, site resource guides, FAQs, etc.) and review, modify or rearrange its pages. Administrators allow/disallow collaboration to whatever extent they desire.
  • Newsletters—Regularly emailed publications keeps you in touch with your subscribers.
  • Press release manager—Allows your administrator to distribute press releases to multiple online news, syndication and newswire services.
  • Event calendar—provides visitors with a complete list of all upcoming events.

 
Community Features

  • Allow public visitors to create new accounts—Visitors to the site can create a free member account. Member accounts are required to access all member functionality.
  • Public member profile page—Visitors can see the profile page of a member. This will typically happen when a member posts a comment and the comment links to their member profile page.
  • Poll manager—A content creation management tool enables you to create and edit polls on a site.
  • User Management—Administrators can set up additional administrative accounts to give control of site management to others in the organization. Prerequisite is User management for the following:
  • Comment Control—Administration can specify which pages can be commented upon by users.
  • Relationship—Allows members to be friends with each other, à la Facebook.
  • Organic Groups—Allows members to create a group and invite members to that group.
  • Forums—A dynamic Internet message board allows users to post messages regarding one or more topics of discussion. Forums of user-generated content promote a virtual community for regular visitors.
  • Blogs—Administrators can add blog pages to your site. Also called online journals or diaries, blogs are primarily textual, but may also focus on photographs (photoblog), videos (vlog), audio (podcasting) and even sketches. Blogs may contain links to Web pages.

 

Drupal includes a host of other core modules that enable specific functionality. As an experienced Drupal integrator and implementer, Acro Media is open to all your requests. Complete info on this award-winning open-source CMS is at http://drupal.org.