Curtis Carmichael

Drupal Design Camp Boston was a 2-day event held between June 13-14, 2009 at the Stata Center on MIT’s campus. This was the first event focusing exclusively on how to design/create themes for Drupal. Drupal conferences/events in the past were primarily geared for ‘techies’ vs. those who have more of a creative/design background. Admission, lunch and coffee were free courtesy of the event sponsors.

Overall, I felt this was a great event. The speakers were primarily from the ‘techie’ side of the Drupal spectrum so it was a bit difficult to follow theming/design advice being more of a web marketing and design type and not presently having a solid understanding of Drupal’s terminology, but they provided an excellent overview/foundation for me and others like myself to grow upon.

I learned designing for Drupal can become easier by utilizing grid design tools and other utilities such as Blueprint CSS, NineSixty, Skinr, Studio, Yahoo CSS etc. Using a grid system/CSS framework can significantly reduce development time, address browser compatibility issues via built-in functions/code and allow you to be on the ’same page’ as other developers in creating web sites and thus set yourself up to get more support by utilizing well-known development tools.

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WordPress (www.wordpress.com), a popular open-source blogging platform written in PHP/MySQL has a plethora of built-in search engine optimization features built-in, making the software desirable to independent web entrepreneurs and established businesses alike.

I particularly like WordPress’s built-in SEO system utilizing Apache’s mod_rewrite capabilities (URL rewriting). I’ve evaluated various open source CMS products and noticed (based on my experience alone, working on very targeted, niche-centric sites) that search engines such as Google tend to favor content delivered WordPress over other platforms such as Joomla. To clarify, I am speaking of the CMS’s default, build-in SEO features. There are certainly many plug-ins – both free/open source and commercial – you can install for popular CMS products such as Joomla that are designed to enhance the default SEO functionality.

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First, as a caveat (and despite all the hype of CMS’s), unless you are a major corporation with thousands of employees requiring the ability to create/maintain web content on-the-fly, the benefits of implementing a static or semi-dynamic web site may outweigh the advantages of a bona-fide Content Management System.

You should ask yourself whether or not you require a site-wide CMS. Publishers for instance may only need a news/article publishing system vs. having the ability to maintain their entire web content collection via the web. Such systems mimic the capability of popular blog systems such as Wordpress (www.wordpress.org) and Movable Type (www.movabletype.org) — both very powerful programs.

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