Drupal Planet

OK, OK. Yes, I rode the whale. :-)

As I mentioned a few days ago, I challenged Dries Buytaert, the founder and project lead of Drupal, to ride a mechanical whale on Bourbon Street while we were at Do It With Drupal last week. He took me up on my challenge and Dries Rode the Whale.

It seems that I "forgot" to post my video so, here you go:

It's a lot harder than it looks, especially when you're wearing slacks. The vinyl whale was SLICK. My favorite part is that I had been drinking substantially less than Dries that night and he was able to stay on the whale significantly longer than I did.

Anyway, we had a great time and I look forward to DIWD again next year.

I was in New Orleans at Do it With Drupal (DIWD) this week, the premier Drupal training event put on each year by Lullabot. One of the great things about this event is that some of the biggest names in Drupal come out to teach, train, and interact with the community.

One of them is Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal. One thing that can be said for Dries, he is willing to try anything. And I mean ANYTHING.

I met up with several Drupalers and, while walking down Bourbon street, we came across this bar that had a mechanical whale...for riding. Like a mechanical bull, right? Dries leaned over and said, "Come on, Ben, you've got to ride the whale."

I said, "Dries, good buddy, I'll ride the whale first but you've got to go second."

To my surprise, he agreed and, the following hilarity ensued.

I have never been more proud to be part of the Drupal community. :-)

Google recently rolled out a new feature that displays site hierarchies at the bottom of each search result. In case you missed it, check out our blog post from last week, Google Eats Drupal Breadcrumbs, Passes on Pie Normally, you would see a green URL below the link and link text that shows you where you are headed, but the green URL has now been replaced with a hierarchy that shows the precise location of the page on the website.
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This was great news for the Drupal community because Drupal generates these site hierarchies, or breadcrumbs, right out of the box. Google is now using these breadcrumbs in their SERPs to help searchers, and anyone using the breadcrumbs feature in Drupal’s core is benefiting from it.

Drupal also offers a sweet module called Custom Breadcrumbs 2 that allows you to further customize your breadcrumbs, maximizing their relevancy and cleanliness.

Custom Breadcrumbs 2

This module “allows its administrators to set up parametrized breadcrumb trails for any node type.” For example, this blog post can have breadcrumbs set up as “Home > Blog > 2009 > December” for CCK-style node types.


New features have been added to the Custom Breadcrumbs 2 release that includes support for views, panels, taxonomy vocabularies and terms, paths, and a simple API. That way you can enable breadcrumbs for contributed modules on module pages and theme templates, increasing overall visibility. Custom Breadcrumbs 2 also allows admin to use php code snippets in forming breadcrumb titles and paths.

There is a beta version of Custom Breadcrumbs 2 now available for testing at http://drupal.org/project/custom_breadcrumbs. All versions support multiple languages. There will also be a full Drupal 7 release of Custom Breadcrumbs 2. If you haven’t already, download and configure it in with your Drupal-powered site. It is easy and helps maximize your online path in Google results.

We are curious to know what other people feel about Drupal’s breadcrumbs. Are you using breadcrumbs for your Drupal site? Let us know about your experience with Drupal’s core breadcrumbs feature, or the Custom Breadcrumbs module below in a comment. Have you not jumped on the breadcrumbs bandwagon? Let us know below if you aren’t sold on the idea, or just want to know a little bit more.

The spending season is upon us and every e-commerce site should be humming with holiday-hungry visitors. Drupal-powered sites have many opportunities to maximize their seasonal revenue by fine-tuning their core installation with a few excellent modules. Many Drupal e-commerce sites may already utilize one or two of these Drupal modules, but if all three are configured and installed, you will be optimizing your holiday profits. Here are three essential Drupal modules for e-commerce sites.

Ubercart

Ubercart is a Drupal e-commerce suite, and darn fine one. Right of the box, Ubercart is the ultimate solution for sites that sell physical goods, digital downloads, and site memberships. It was developed specifically with Drupal and the end user in mind, focusing on usability in three essential areas: store configuration, product and catalog creation, and order administration. The front end of Ubercart is configurable and integrates seamlessly with all of Drupal’s major systems, i.e. taxonomy, node, user, etc. On the back end, the settings and admin is designed for ease of use.

AdSense

The AdSense module allows online content providers to earn revenue from visitors by displaying ads from Google AdSense™ advertising service on their sites. AdSense for Search and Drupal are not naturally compatible, but this module allows you to display search results in your site, provide easy-to-use ad blocks, and simple controls for live troubleshooting. You will also have control to disable ads for certain roles. If you want to have ad revenue sharing on your Drupal site, this is your best option.

SEO Checklist

The SEO Checklist provides a checklist of Drupal SEO best practices. You will optimize your Drupal site rankings in all the major search engines, like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. The module provides a checklist that walks you through what needs to be done to your site. The first step is to look at what modules you already have installed. Then, all you have to do is go down to the list of unchecked items and complete them. Once you have completed the list, you are done. It’s that easy.

If you haven’t already, install and utilize these three essential Drupal modules for your site. If you know of any other Drupal modules that you have found especially useful for e-commerce sites, please comment below.

When you use Google to search there is a green web address, or URL, at the bottom of each result so that you know where you are headed. Last week, Google rolled out a new feature that replaces the URL in search results with a site hierarchy, showing the precise location of the page on the website. The new feature: site hierarchy, or site navigation “breadcrumbs” gives a lot more information then the URL paths that were displayed before the update.

This is exciting news for Drupal-powered websites. Drupal generates breadcrumbs right out of the box and displays them in the default templates. Google now recognizes these navigational links and uses them in the SERPs. If you are using Drupal breadcrumbs in your template, you are essentially getting a helping hand from Google immediately.

Drupal’s Breadcrumb Modules

Drupal offers some additional modules you can use that will further customize your breadcrumbs. Click below to go to their respective homepages.

• Taxonomy Breadcrumb
• Custom Breadcrumbs
• Menu Breadcrumb
• Node Breadcrumb

Breadcrumbs are very functional, and that fact is not lost on Drupal developers. Even though breadcrumbs are not necessary for every website, Google’s new feature will help reinvigorate the popularity and usefulness of breadcrumbs in SEO, as well as help solidify Drupal’s footing at the top of the open-source CMS hill.

Once you have your Meta tags module installed and configured on your Drupal site, you will want to specify meta tags for all your current and future content. Taxonomy is a very broad kind of content on your Drupal site, so it is a good idea to use broad, category-like keywords for your meta tags. Simply put, it is how you classify content in Drupal.

Many Drupal sites’ first taxonomy is category. You can also have subcategories of Taxonomy called terms, and terms will have subterms, and so on. It is very easy in Drupal to see all your content in a certain category just by visiting the taxonomy list for a specific term. The URL for a taxonomy list will be something like this: http://www.yourDrupalsite.com/category/term/subterm.

Here is a quick tutorial on how to edit or add taxonomy meta tag categories, terms and subterms in Drupal:
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1. Go to your Administer | Content Management | Taxonomy page.

2. If you want to edit an existing vocabulary, click edit vocabulary next to the one you’d like to edit. If you want to create a new one, click add vocabulary.

3. Enter in all the details you want in the fields. Enter the description in the Description field and the keywords in the Keywords field, which you want for taxonomy.

4. This one is very important. Click Save.

You can do this for each taxonomy term as well. Since terms are more specific kind of content on your website, you can use specific categories for keywords.

1. Go to the Taxonomy page again and click on List. You should see a list of your terms.

2. Click on the edit link. You will see the meta tags fields listed near the bottom. Enter your meta tags into the fields provided.

3. Finally, click Save.

This should give you a great start on the taxonomy for your site. It will help your site’s SEO and help the content management stay clean and tidy. For more help like this, check out Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization and learn more best practices of Drupal SEO.

Google is making some buzz in the SEO circles with their new “Caffeine” project performing well in beta and set to hit the inter-waves early next year. Caffeine will introduce fresh algorithms that switch up the equation of ranking. Although, I do not know what the spiders’ new favorite meals will be, I do know that one factor in your ranking will be how quickly a web pages load on your site.

If you are running a Drupal site, hopefully you have sped it up using all the built-in Drupal options. But that may not be enough for Caffeine’s standards, so you will need to solve that problem. Here are five additional things you can do to accelerate your Drupal-clean site speed from running to sprinting.
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1. Add

First, you should look into additional Drupal modules that offer additional options for caching like Advanced cache, ApacheBench, Authenticated User Page Caching (Authcache), Block Cache Alter, Boost, Cache browser, Cache Router, JavaScript Aggregator, and Memcache.

2. Switch

If you are using a hosting company, ask to move to a faster server or switch hosting companies.

3. Upgrade

If you upgrade your server and/or your bandwidth, your website will run much quicker.

4. Spread Out

Deploy Drupal to multiple servers to allow for better performance.

5. Utilize

Use PHP-level caching systems like Zend Platform.

Google’s Caffeine is coming and you want your Drupal site to be ready. While you are optimizing your Drupal site to look clean, don’t forget to make sure it can load fast as well. For more speed help, go to www.Drupal.org for dozens of pages dealing with all kinds of performance enhancements with Drupal.

One of the coolest things about RSS in Drupal is that you never need to worry about creating the feeds yourself. Almost any list of nodes in Drupal has an RSS feed associated with it. Your homepage automatically has an RSS feed, as well as any category pages you create. Even pages created with the Views module have RSS feeds. The trick is that all of these RSS feeds are hidden from view. And if your visitors can’t see then, then they can’t subscribe to your content.

Luckily, there is a sweet module that helps you show your RSS feeds to your visitors. It’s called Syndication, and it’s another fine module from Moshe Weitzman. Here is how you set it up:
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1.Download the Syndication module and install it like any normal Drupal module.

2. Go to your admin screen and click on Administer | Content Management | RSS feed syndication link. You’ll see the RSS feed syndication screen.

3. Enter the number of columns you would like to have displayed on the syndication page.

4. Select Blogs if you would like each user’s blog RSS feed to show up on the syndication page.

5. Under Vocabularies, select the category that you would like to show up on the syndication page.

6. You may want to leave the Taxonomy terms with no nodes option, set at the default of Do not show terms which are not used by any nodes.

7. Click on Save Configuration.

This should get you well on your way to syndicating to your content (with the Syndication module) and creating visible RSS feeds for your Drupal-optimized site. If you are need of further consulting on all things Drupal, check out the Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization book for more professional Drupal SEO tips, or give Volacci a call.