Your CMS is one of Your Best Marketing Tools

Elias DabbasApril 28, 2010

Web Analytics Wednesday - Dubai

“Product” is still one of the central themes of any marketing effort

Image: soopertutorials.com

What Kind of Product?

• Features• Flexibility• Speed • Adaptability

Traditional Cycle

Marketing (requirements)

Design(Layout/ Themes)

Development(features,

functionality, etc)

How About…

Marketing (requirements)

Marketing(Layout/ Themes)

Marketing(features,

functionality, etc)

A good CMS allows you to:

• Tweak the layout / design• Add, edit, and delete business rules• Add / remove functionality • Gives you insights on users

All within certain limits

How Drupal Does It

Layout: Blocks System

Zones

Layout: Block System

• Control where to place each block (on which zone, and in which order)

• Control which users have access to this block (logged in, not logged in, administrator, etc)

• Decide on which pages this block appears

Views: display content the way you want

Examples: • Most recent comments, sorted by date• User’s latest articles, sorted by view count• Articles with a certain tag(s), coming from a certain

group of users, sorted by comment count, placed in a block, visible only to logged in users

Example

10 minutes

=

SELECT twitter.twitter_id AS twitter_id, twitter.text AS twitter_text, twitter.created_time AS twitter_created_time FROM drup_twitter twitter LEFT JOIN drup_twitter_account twitter_account ON twitter.screen_name = twitter_account.screen_name LEFT JOIN drup_twitter_user twitter_user ON twitter_account.screen_name = twitter_user.screen_name LEFT JOIN drup_users users ON twitter_user.uid = users.uid WHERE (users.uid in ('1')) AND ((twitter.screen_name) = ('eliasdabbas')) ORDER BY twitter_created_time DESC

Long time

User Roles & Permissions

Control which type of user can perform which actionCreate new types of users and define them by the actions they are allowed

to perform

SEO: Path, Pathauto, Titles

• Determine what the URL/Title of each post is as you create it

• Pathauto allows you to make a general automated template for URLs for examplemysite.com/[user-name]/[article-title]

Reporting

• Different statistics and reports on key events on the site

• What people search for• Error pages

Special Behavior With Rules• Creates specific rules and

behaviors based on your business needs.

Examples: - When someone saves a

comment, send an email notification

- When someone registers, display a certain message on the page

- When a user of type “editor” logs in display a list of latest articles

Flexible Menu System

• Add, edit, remove menu links

• Change the order any time

• Make them expanded

Thousands of modules that extend and improve functionality

• Tagging systems• Views enhancements• Social networking• Content display• Mail and communication• Search

Conclusion

• Take immediate control of the “little” things that you want to change and test.

• Invest developers’ and designers’ time into strategic more important project

• Have fun in the process!

Thank you