Graphic Alliance loves Drupal 7 because it powers more than 150 sites for the federal government states and, frankly, if it is good enough for The White House it is surely good enough for our clients. For a more in-depth appraisal of the system and whether Drupal 7 CMS is the best for corporate website design, please read on…
Total control over page templates
The “Panels” system allows a site administrator to create any number of customized page layouts for their website. At its core is a drag and drop content manager that lets you visually design a page and place content within the chosen layout to create engaging online destinations. Homepages, landing pages, brochure wear, news and article based content may all be customized using functionality available to administrators that requires no coding skills.
Create as many page templates as your site needs
Create complex, content rich and engaging online destinations
Manage page layout proportions using the easy to use interface, add new columns, rows for page content, then alter widths using the drag and drop sliders.
Rearrange content within pages using the drag and drop content manager. Add, delete, hide and edit content with just a few clicks, no coding skills required.
Preview changes before publishing.
Site theme
Each site contains a comprehensive site styling control panel used for changing the basic colour theme of a site. This easy to use interface allows administrators to safely make site wide style changes in real time and preview them as they do. A complete website colour pallet overhaul may be made in minutes and applied once approved with the ability to roll back to the default any point thereafter.
Simple to use tools enable site wide style changes.
Content control
All site content is managed within an easy-to-use web interface. The system is built with flexibility in mind and handles countless content types including video, text, blog, podcasts, and polls with robust user management, menu handling, real-time statistics and optional revision control.
Typical content types used (but not limited to) within the CMS
- Rich text content*: basic text and image editing, centrally controlled styling protects consistency within the site whilst providing sufficient freedom for varying content
- Multimedia management*: upload many types of multimedia content types, images, pdfs, powerpoint files, etc. presented in isolation or within list formats
- Webforms*: create and monitor custom data capture forms for online enquiries, polls, competitions etc.
- Image slideshows: present collections of image content within interactive slideshows
- Carousels: cycle through a set of different promotional features to enable a large amount of content to be presented in a singe area
- News and/or blog content: quickly add article based content that is categorized and automatically features on the homepage, news listing page, related business pages etc. Used to promote knowledge leadership in specific areas whilst improving site SEO keyword density
- Accordion: interactive areas of content that expand/collapse on request and is broken into logical sections, much like tabs
- Views: create lists of inter-related content from both your own site and remote data stores, for example RSS, Flickr media, YouTube content etc.
and many more…
Rich text editing
Each website is equipped with a modern ready-for-use HTML text editor designed to simplify web content creation. It’s a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that brings common word processor features directly to your web pages and allows administrators of all skill levels create and edit content.
In addition to the easy to use interface the editor is designed to comply with web accessibility guidelines. The editor is WAI-ARIA and Section 508 compliant and also supports high contrast and interface keyboard navigation.
Create content using a familiar word processing interface tool.
Managing site media
The media management system provides an extensible framework for managing files and multimedia assets, regardless of whether they are hosted on your own site or a 3rd party site. The core system presents unified user interface where editors and administrators can upload, manage, and reuse multimedia assets. The media files held within this system may be summoned into place by the panels system to create engaging online content, image galleries, interactive slideshows, carousels, and large promotional banners are all content options for your pages. Administrators are permitted to access tools allowing them to perform mass media file uploads for bulk uploads as well as an easy to use drag and drop upload tool for effortless uploads. All images are automatically resized and/or cropped to the sizes required for use within the website. If new sizes are required they may be simply added and all existing media will be resized accordingly.
Upload as many files as you need in bulk or one by one.
Webforms – create custom data capture
Webform is a system for making surveys, polls, contact enquiry forms etc. After a form has been submitted the visitor to the site may be sent an e-mail “receipt” as well as a notification being sent to specific administrators. Submission results are all stored within the CMS for basic statistical review and can be exported into Excel or other spreadsheet applications.
Drag and drop builder: build online forms just by dragging the required input fields into your form, use input fields, radio buttons, dropdowns whatever you need.
Multiple pages: breaking your form into multiple pages can make it easier for you to categorize questions, and it also helps to make the form look less overwhelming.
Multiple E-mails: send e-mails to both the recipient and the administrator responsible for the form, include attachments, customize your sites response to submissions.
Instant Results: get at-a-glance information about how many submissions you’ve received and what people are saying.
Create as many online data capture forms as your site needs
Content in context
Contexts are checked before any piece of content is displayed to a site visitor. Specific content areas of any given page may be classified as sensitive and only displayed to logged in users to create tiered content access within a single page or entire site.
Social networking
Social networking integration is also widely supported within the CMS tools. Modules such as the Facebook Connect module, Twitter module, and ShareThis module help expand your network, and make your product or message more engaging to a wider audience. For example, the Twitter module allows you to connect Twitter accounts with site user accounts, display tweets on your site and if required automatically send a tweet whenever new content is published.
Efficient working – shared content
The Panels system mentioned earlier may also be used for items smaller than entire pages. Repeating pieces of identical content may be used throughout a site but managed and edited from a single point. For example, a site may contain numerous news article pages that all include details of the primary contact for news and an email newsletter signup form. Should the contact details need to change then the shared piece of content may be updated once and the change appear instantly on all pages that feature this shared piece of content.
Extending the core functionality
With more than 16,000 additional add-on modules, the Drupal system can meet the vast majority of your site’s requirements in a cost efficient manner. On the rare occasions that no existing module meets your exact needs, we are able to develop specific modules to complete specialized tasks.
Interactive seating plan for the Lloyd’s trading floor with content manager
Bespoke claims reporting tool for brokers to review outstanding claims status and notes
Workflow
The workflow system allows the creation and assignment of arbitrary workflows to CMS content types. Workflows are made up of workflow states, for example, a workflow with the states Draft, Review, and Published could be assigned to the News article content type. Transitions between workflow states can have preprogrammed actions assigned to them. In our example, we could assign an action so that when the news article moves from the Draft state to the Review state an email is automatically sent out to the administrator who holds privileges to publish content.
Caching - faster page load times
Since most sites have very specific caching needs based upon content and traffic patterns our CMS system was designed to let sites devise their own triggers for cache clearing. Areas of content can be cached as a whole, the entire output of the page can be cached or just individual content areas that take time to download can be cached to optimize your audience’s browsing experience.
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