Web Business Marketing Blog

Knowledge management is the flip side of business marketing. Selling complex technical products and services requires broad and in-depth knowledge.

Blogs are natural knowledge management tools, but they do have a tendency to crumble when processing a lot of content.

This is the area where Drupal as a content management system performs extremely well. Its content module allows you to define a variety of content types, and process them as a single content stream. Its taxonomy module allows you to tag information with its various attributes (country, author, journal, organisation, …).

I’ve just had a good look at Drupal 5.2, the latest release, and it’s very impressive. Although I’ve gone where no business marketeer has gone before (the server side), I’ve also wisely decided not to ever write a single line of php-code. Still, downloading and installing Drupal is a breeze, as is installing most of its many modules.

The main work is actually not in the software installation and configuration: it’s deciding what site architecture you will use, i.e.:

• how you will organise your data, and provide access to it via a system that is scalable to thousands of nodes and beyond. Here you can use both multi-dimensional menus (the classic solution), but you can combine them with navigation blocks which are context-specific (i.e. changeable per page)
• what vocabularies to use in the taxonomy module (which will be hard to modify once your content is in the system)
• your user types and their privileges (including training of your moderators)

Once you’ve done this upfront effort, Drupal comes with many nice features allowing you to earn a return on investment:

• you can give every user an own blog (by just activating the blog application, which means ticking a box)
• you can have ‘unlimited’ corporate blogs. Each taxonomy term you define creates its own feed
• all these blogs, personal or corporate, are fully integrated into your website as a portal

Drupal 6 meanwhile is imminent, and if it represents a similar leap forward as between 4 & 5, Drupal is likely to consolidate its position as a leading content management system. Thank you to the Drupal developer community for an excellent job.

PS Although it may appear as a paradox to rave about Drupal on a Wordpress blog, I manage or participate to following Drupal sites for the moment: Leonardo ENERGY, Sustainable Energy for All, B2Bridge and a few others for internal purposes.