Laura let everyone know last week that Idealware's web site is up for a major upgrade, coming soon. The Idealware blog won't be left behind -- we're happy to announce new bloggers and some other important changes that coincide with the Web Site update. Here's what you'll want (and need) to know:
New Bloggers!
We're growing the blog roster, with an eye towards landing at ten bloggers posting about twice a month, for a healthy and diverse amount of content focused on helping nonprofits use software and technology to serve their missions. Joining Heather Gardner-Madras, Steven Backman, Eric Leland, Laura Quinn and myself are:
Johanna Bates has a strong background in technology management, with special knowledge of the web and online communications.
Debra Askanase brings her background of 20 years of community organizing with a focus and expertise in how nonprofits use social media to the blog.
Andrea Berry, who currently serves as Idealware's Director of development, brings her expertise in fundraising and donor management systems to the blog.
Marc Baizman brings a broad range of tech skills to the blog, with a background as both a nonprofit technology director and consultant in the sector.
New RSS Address!
Take note that, if you're one of the hundreds of people who subscribe to this blog in an RSS Reader, we will be moving to a new RSS address. You can change your settings now, and that's recommended, as the old feed will stop updating once we're on the new site. The address is:
As we make changes and improvements to the blog, we're eager to hear from you. What do you look to get from the Idealware blog? What works? What doesn't? What would you like to see more of? What burning topics are we failing to address? With a bigger group of bloggers and a renewed focus, we want to write about the things that you'd like to know more about. Feel free to offer your suggestions any time, either in the comments, or to Idealware at our Twitter feed or Facebook page.
I’m at an interesting intersection in my career path. I just concluded eight years at a small, statewide health care reform nonprofit in Massachusetts called Community Partners. I was Technology & Strategy Director there. Like so many orgs around us, we went under a month ago due to the bad economy. Though I am sad to lose my wonderful co-workers, it was coming for a long time, so I was somewhat prepared. A long time ago, other organizations and foundations started asking me lots of technology questions. This has naturally parlayed into consulting.
At this juncture where I have a sense of what it's like to work in a small org and am also looking at and helping larger orgs and foundations to make decisions about tech and use it in smart ways, I’m thinking a lot about something I call "supported open source."
"How do I choose a CMS?" is one of the most frequent questions I get. "Should I go with a closed but well-supported system or should I venture out into the Badlands of Open Source?" There is another way! That is supported open source.
The perception is often that if you choose open source—even if you hire additional expertise to initially build your site—you have to have skills in-house to keep it going after launch. I think the perception that you're on your own with open source is one of the barriers to its adoption for many businesses and nonprofits. But there are companies and consultants that will stick around, long after your site is launched, to give you the help and support you need. And there are different ways of doing this based on your org's budget.
At Community Partners, we ran things on a shoestring. I build web sites, but I don't write custom PHP code. When we wanted to use a profile module to collect contact information from users on our Drupal site and sync it with our Access mailing list database (yes, I know... Old Skool...), I found the module. It didn't work right. This functionality was a priority for us, though. Luckily, we maintained a contractual relationship with a Drupal consultant who would help us out with our site when our budget allowed. We only paid him to help us when something was broken, or when we wanted a new feature we couldn't implement ourselves and we had the funds to do it.
Having someone you can pay to give you support only when you need it is clearly cheapest way to go. If you're rolling in money, however, having a company on-call 24-7 to support you with anything you need is the other end of the spectrum. And everything in between exists. I want to disclose here that at present, I have a paid relationship with a consulting firm called OpenIssue LLC, which offers a spectrum of services for open source CMS platforms. I am working with them because I am becoming increasingly convinced that supported open source is has some serious advantages for our sector.
I am dogmatic about not being dogmatic, and the needs and mission of an org should always determine what technology they choose, not the other way around. You're never married to a piece of software and you should change platforms if and whenever it serves you. But particularly during this time of economic uncertainty, there is something comforting to me about software that's being developed by a worldwide brain trust. Open source software can't be yanked out from under you if funds (temporarily) disappear, or if a contract expires, because we all own it.
Though this community code base can be messy, open source development specialists know how to clean it up for you. So you get that worldwide scope of innovation, plus the focused attention on your org's particular needs. For orgs that want to stay innovative but don't always have cash flow, this can be a great solution. Ongoing support can be stopped and re-started as needed when there are budget troubles.
I know of a few companies out there that explicitly offer ongoing support for open source platforms. My fave among these is PICnet. Non-Profit Soapbox is designed to be an affordable, fully hosted, software-as-a-service (SaaS) way for nonprofits to build sites quickly and easily in the Joomla! CMS. PICnet has been around for a long time, and honestly I don't know why more companies aren't offering open source SaaS for nonprofits. Seems like a great idea to me. Here are a couple more companies that offer ongoing support:
I predict more of these companies will emerge in the coming year, and I think it will be a great leap forward for our sector. Do you know of a company or a consultant that offers ongoing support for open source software platforms? If so, I'd love to know about them. Please add them in the comments.
The announcement that GuideStar, Charity Navigator and others would be moving away from the 990 form as their primary source for assessing nonprofit performance raised a lot of interesting questions, such as "How will assessments of outcomes be standardized in a way that is not too subjective?" and "What will be required of nonprofits in order to make those assessments?" We'll have a chance to get some preliminary answers to those questions on February 4th, when NTEN will sponsor a phone-in panel discussion with representatives of GuideStar and Charity Navigator, as well as members of the nonprofit community. The panel will be hosted by Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy, and will include:
As my colleague Steve Backman fully explains here, here's been some fallout from this story for Microsoft. First, like Google and Yahoo!, Microsoft operates a search engine in China and submits to the Chinese governments censoring filters. They've kept mum on their feelings about the cyber-attack. Google's analysis of that attack reveals that GMail accounts were hacked and other breaches occurred via security holes in Internet Explorer, versions six and up, that allow a hacker to upload programs and take control of a user's PC. As this information came to light, France and Germany both issued advisories to their citizens that switching to a browser other than Internet Explorer would be prudent. In response, Microsoft has issued a statement recommending that everyone upgrade from Internet Explorer version 6 to version 8, the current release. What Microsoft doesn't mention is that the security flaw exists in versions seven and eight as well as six, so upgrading won't protect you from the threat, although they just released a patch that hopefully will.
So, while their reasoning is suspect, it's nice to see that Microsoft has finally joined the campaign to remove this old, insecure and incompatible with web standards browser.
I have kept Google Wave open in a tab in my browser since the day my account was opened, subscribed to about 15 waves, some of them quite well populated. I haven't seen an update to any of these waves since January 12th, and it was really only one wave that's gotten any updates at all in the past month. I can't give away the invites I have to offer. The conclusion I'm drawing is that, if Google doesn't do something to make the Wave experience more compelling, it's going to go the way of a Simply Red B-Side and fade from memory. As I've said, there is real potential here for something that puts telecommunication, document creation and data mining on a converged platform, and that would be new. But, in it's current state, it's a difficult to use substitute for a sophisticated Wiki. And, while Google was hyping this, Confluence released a new version of their excellent (free for nonprofits) enterprise Wiki that can incorporate (like Wave) Google gadgets. That makes me want to pack up my surfboard.
Last week, we talked about domain registrar services and what to look for. In today's followup, we'll focus on how to transfer a domain and the accompanying security concerns, then talk a bit about registrars vis a vis hosting services.
Domain Transfers
Transferring domains is a somewhat complex process that has been designed to minimize the risk of domain hijacking. In order to insure that transfers are performed by the actual owner of the domain, a few important measures are in place:
Every domain has an authorization (a.k.a. EPP) code associated with it. Transfers can not occur without this code being submitted. If you don’t have this information, your current registrar does. Some registrars have automated functions that will deliver that information to the domain contact; others require that you ask for them via email to the registrar or their support ticket application. Registrars are required to provide you with these codes within five calendar days of your request. If they don’t, your best recourse is to determine who they get their domain authority from (there are only a handful of companies that resell registration services) and appeal to them for assistance.
Communication is strictly through the registered “whois” email address of the domain owner. You can determine what that is by doing a whois lookup on your domain.
Tip: While most domains can be looked up at http://whois.net. However, whois.net has some trouble with .org domains, so the alternative http://www.pir.org/whois is a more reliable source for most non-profit domains.
If the address that your domain is registered with is either non-functional or owned by someone other than you, then you need to update it, via your current registrar’s web interface, before you can successfully transfer the domain.
Domains can (and should) be locked to prohibit transfers before and after you switch registrars. Locking and unlocking your domains is usually done by you, from your registrar’s web site. If you don’t have options to do that when you log on to the web site, your registrar should do it for you upon request.
Transfer Procedures
To initiate the transfer, go to the web site of the registrar that you want to switch to and follow their instructions. They will have you submit a request and, upon receipt of your domain fees, issue an email to the email address associated with the domain containing a link to a form where you can confirm the request. That form will also ask for the authorization code. Subsequently - and this can take up to seven days - you’ll receive an email from your current registrar asking you to confirm the transfer request. Once that is submitted, the transfer should go through. Detailed rules about how domains are transferred, as well as what the responsibilities of the registrars are in handling the transfers, are listed at http://www.icann.org/en/transfers/policy-en.htm.
Choosing Registrars
Registrars charge anywhere from $5.00 to $50 dollars for a year’s domain service. The two best known registrars are Network Solutions and GoDaddy. Many people go with Network Solutions because they're the longest standing of the registrars (for many years, they were the only registrar). GoDaddy has become very popular by dramatically undercutting the cost. Note, though, that both of these registrars have been accused of questionable business practices:
Network Solutions has engaged in "Front Running", a questionable practice of locking domains that a potential customer might search for in order to block competitors from making the sale. They will also use subdomains of your domain to advertise, a practice called subdomain hijacking. A decent registrar will not seek to make profits based on your intellectual property.
GoDaddy famously suspends accounts based on corporate requests. In 2007, they suspended seclists.org, a website that archives internet security mailing lists, per the request of MySpace, with no court order or valid complaint. MySpace was upset that content posted to one of the lists that Seclists archived was inappropriate. But, instead of contacting Seclists to deal with the content in question, GoDaddy closed the site and wouldn't respond to desperate emails or phone calls regarding the sudden closure. Worse, after the fiasco was resolved, they were unrepentant, and reserve the right to shut down any site for any spurious reason. If your NPO does work that is in the least bit controversial, keep this in mind when considering GoDaddy.
Web Hosting and Registrars
Many registrars supplement their business by providing web hosting services as well. Some will even offered discounted or free domain registration with a hosting plan. While this simplifies things, it can also be a bit risky in the “eggs in one basket” sense. Having a separate registrar and control over your DNS service allows you to be more flexible with switching hosts, should your current host prove themselves unreliable or go out of business. And the web hosting industry is pretty volatile, with companies coming and going pretty quickly. I would suggest a best practice is to keep your host and registrar separate.
Domain Name Management: not a very sexy topic. This will be a rare post for me that won't mention popular search engines, the latest "superphone", content management or rumored tablets. But I hope I can provide a good glossary on a geeky subject that anyone with a web site sporting their organization's name has to deal with.
You have a web site and you have a domain, and as long as the web site is up and running, everything is fine. But what happens if your domain is hijacked? What if you need to make changes to your domain registration, or register a new one, and your registrar is simply disinterested? What if they go out of business? Your domain name is a valuable property, and you should keep it in pro-active and trustworthy hands.
How Domain Registration Works
Domain registrars provide the service of keeping your domain name mapped with current information so that it can be found on the web. Domain names are meaningful aliases for numeric IP addresses, and aren’t technically required in order to host a web site. But, the internet would be hard to navigate if we could only find things by their numeric addresses.
The primary thing that a registrar does is to keep your contact (whois) data maintained; point your domain to the appropriate name servers; and allow you to move your domain to another registrar if you choose to.
Domain Services
In addition to domain registration, most registrars offer additional services, such as:
DNS Management (address mapping) for subdomains (which allows you to host your main domain on one server, but, perhaps, an online store called “store.yourdomain.com” on another server),
Aliasing of Addresses (so that both http://yourdomain.com and http://www.yourdomain.com go to the same place),
Backup Mail Handling, so, should your primary mail server go down, messages sent to you will be stored until they come back around;
Web Forwarding, so you can, say, register yourdomain.org, yourdomain,.com and yourdomain.net, but forward all visitors to the .com and .net sites to your website at yourdomain.org.
SSL (Secure Socket Layer) Certificates, to encrypt sensitive data, like online donation forms.
Things to Look For in a New Registrar
Are they accredited? ICANN, the organization that oversees domain management , accredits registrars. If they aren’t on ICANN’s list, they aren’t trustworthy.
Do they add a year to the existing expiration date, or charge you for a full year as of engagement? They should do the former.
Do they offer automated access to all functions (via web forms), including locking/unlocking domains, retrieval of authorization (EPP) codes, and modification of all whois records? (Some registrars prefer to list themselves as the technical contact. It should be up to you whether they can have an official name on your domain, not them).
Do they list a telephone number, and is it promptly answered during business hours?
Do they respond promptly to emails and support requests? The ability to communicate with your registrar is rarely needed, but, when it is, it’s critical - you don’t want them out of the loop if your domain is subject to an attempted hijack.
Do they offer the ability to manage DNS for mail servers and subdomains? While this is an added feature, it’s common enough to be worth expecting.
Do they have any additional services (examples above)? While these supplemental services are far from critical, they are convenient. More to the point, a company that is engaging in a robust suite of services is more likely to be focused on their business. The truth is that anyone can be a domain registrar, if they make the proper investment, but whether it’s a going concern or a neglected piece of extra income for them is a question you’ll want to ask.
Next week: Safely transferring domains and a word on web hosting completes the topic.
...or you might. I find that, in a 25 year IT career that has always included a percentage of tech support, human nature is to use the features of an application that we know about, and only go looking for new features when a clearly defined need for one arises. In that scenario, some great functionality might be hiding in plain sight. Here are a few of my favorite "not very well-hidden" secrets. Share yours in the comments.
Google Search Filtering
Have you ever clicked the "Show Options" link on your results page? Do a search for whatever interests you and try it (it's located right under the Google logo). This will add a left navigation bar with some very useful filtering options. Of note, you can narrow to a trendy real-time search buy clicking on "Latest" under "Any Time"; choose a date range,filter out the pages that you've seen, or haven't seen yet - how useful is that for finding that page that you googled last week but didn't save? The funny thing is that Google has an "Advanced Search" screen, which, of course, can do many things that this bar can't (such as searching for public domain media).
Microsoft Outlook Shortcuts
If you use Outlook, you know how simple it is to find your mail and calendar. Other common folders are conveniently placed in your default view. But if you're the slightest bit of a power user, or you work in an environment where users share mailbox folders or use Exchange's Public Folders, than keeping track of all of those folders can get a bit tedious. That's what the Shortcut view is for. Buried below the Mail, Calendar and Task buttons, you can move it up to the visible button list by right-clicking on the bar area (in the lower-left hand corner of Outlook 2003 or 2007's screen) and choosing "Navigation Pane Options". Highlight "Shortcuts" and then click "Move up" enough times to get it in one of the first four positions. Click OK, then click on the "Shortcuts" bar. From here, you can add new shortcuts and, optionally, arrange them in shortcut groups. You can rename the shortcuts with more meaningful titles, so that, if, say, you're monitoring a norther user's inbox, you can give it their name instead of having two folders named "Inbox". One tip: to add shortcuts to a group, right-click on the group title and add from there.
Facebook Friend Lists
Nothing makes Facebook more manageable than Friends Lists, and, with the new security changes, this is more true than ever. If you're like me, your connections on Facebook span every facet of your life, from family to childhood friends to co-workers. Wouldn't it be useful to be able to send links and messages to all of your co-workers but not your friends, or vice-versa? Click on "Friends" from the Facebook menu, then all connections. If you've become a fan of a page or two, you'll see that Facebook has already created two lists for you: Friends and Pages. To make more, scroll through your connection list and click to "Add to List" option to the right. You can create new lists from there, and add friends to multiple lists.
When you share a link, note, video or whatever, you can choose which list to send it to by clicking on the lock icon next to the "Share" button and choosing "Customize".
There Are More
Did you know about these features? Are there other ones that you use that make your use of popular applications and web sites much more manageable? Leave a comment and let us know.
I'm wrapping up the Drupal 101 series with some talk about Drupal themes, and some additional info on topics that we've already covered. The goal of these posts is to give new Drupal administrators an idea about how Drupal works, and some pointers to the key add-ons and resources in the broad Drupal ecosystem. For reference' sake, we started with an intro, moved on to Modules, and then covered navigation. So, now that we have a functional web site, what does it look like?
Getting Themes
Drupal comes with five or six themes to choose from, and, if you use them, then your site will look very, um, uninspired. This might not be a problem if your goal is not to impress your visitors, but simply provide information or functionality, but, if you're putting up a website for your organization, you want one that stands out from the crowd. So you have two choices: you can find a better, less common theme, or you can customize one of the default themes.
The first place to go is to Drupal Theme Garden. This is where many Drupal theme designers share their work. Here, you can either find a theme to use (or customize for your use), or get a good idea about the types of things you can do with your theme.
Customizing Themes
From the Administration menu, you can modify any theme's main text elements, deciding whether or not to display your site's mission or slogan, name or logo. And you can replace the default "droplet" logo with your own logo (a no-brainer!). Assuming that you've started with a theme that you really like, this might be enough. But, if you want to do more serious customizations, such as moving the logo to the center of your header or changing the site colors, you're going to need basic web 4.0 programming skills and, most likely, some level of comfort with the PHP scripting language.
Most themes consist of one or more style sheets, a number of "tpl" files with PHP/HTML code laying out various page elements, such as blocks, footers and sidebars, and one called page.tpl.php that establishes the overall page layout. The main styles are usually stored in styles.css, and you can make a lot of changes to your site's appearance here, modifying default background colors and images, placing and resizing content.
If that's not enough, most customizations can be done using Wordpress's internal macros and functions, meaning that you won't have to worry about assigning variables or what goes into the foreach loops. Wordpress has simple commands that you can insert into a page to loop through your posts and display them or list your categories in the sidebar. A nice breakdown of the Wordpress functions can be found at WpExplorer.com.
If you do modify the stylesheets and templates, make sure that you are storing your themes in sites/default folder and that you're properly backing up whenever you do an upgrade. If you modify theme files in the main themes folder, and then upgrade to, say, a Drupal security fix, your modifications will be overwritten. In general, themes remain functional from dot release to dot release (e.g., what worked for Drupal 6.1 still works in 6.9), but the Drupal maintainers often make dramatic changes in number versions, so don't assume that your theme in Drupal 6.9 will not be messed up if you upgrade to Drupal 7 (coming soon).
More Installation Options
In the first Drupal 101 post, I mentioned Fantastico, a two-click installer for Drupal available on most hosting services that use the cPanel site management interface. I subsequently ran into this useful article about Elefante and Simplescripts. These are packages that you can use to install a variety of popular open source applications, including Drupal.
In addition to application installers, there are other options for installing Drupal:
Customized Drupal installations like Open Atrium and Acquia come with more modules and functionality.
There's been some development and discussion about Installation Profiles, a Drupal add-on functionality that lets you define additional installation details, such as module defaults and inclusion of additional modules and data for distributing custom Drupal installations.
Conclusion
What I hope this Drupal 101 series has done is to offer some context and guidance for people new to Drupal who are about to give it a try, and some backing to my initial proposition that Drupal's strength is it's flexibility. Along the way, I've received tweets asking "Why Drupal?" and my answer is that Drupal isn't the only CMS out there, or necessarily the best one for your web site. There are a huge variety of commercial and open source options. In fact, my personal website runs on a combination of Frog CMS and Wordpress, because I wanted a simple tool for integrating RSS feeds, which Frog provides, and a powerful blogging platform. On the other hand, last week the White House ditched their commercial CMS for Drupal. So this series might also inspire you to look elsewhere, particularly if a more traditional, tree-structured content management interface will work better for you than Drupal's layout by association model. Whichever way you go, we suffer more from a surfeit of good options than a lack of same.
Here's the third in a series of posts on getting started with Drupal, the popular open source content management system. The short intro and discussion on modules are best read first. Today we'll look at site structure, and how menus, blocks and taxonomies can make your site navigable for your visitors.
Menus
Drupal has a simple and flexible tool for creating and managing menus. You can check/uncheck standard functions; assign them to regions (left sidebar, right sidebar, header, footer, etc.); and easily create new items.
By default, Drupal offers three menus that you can add to your site:
Navigation - The main menu is dynamic. It displays items based on the visitor's role and state of authentication. For example, an unauthenticated user might see a "Login" menu item, while an authenticated user would see "logout". An authenticated user who is also a site manager would see the Administer menu. This menu is usually placed in a sidebar, next to the main content
Primary Links - This is often the menu for the main content areas, e.g. Home, Blog, Calendar, About. Primarily links are usually placed in a site's header.
Secondary Links can be used for less popular pages, but ones that you want to have available, such as site maps, privacy notices, and contact links.
You can assign a menu item to any particular piece of content, or to a collection of items by content type. Drupal assigns numbers to individual items. The basic content type is called a node, so the default first page of a web site would be at http://your-site.org/node/1. If you create a blog, the first post would be at http://your-site.org/blog/1.
Tip: Be sure that the Path Module is enabled. Path lets you can rename items with friendlier names than, say, site/node/113.
Say you wanted blog/1 to be your front page, but you also wanted something easier to remember to appear in the address bar, you could rename it "home", so that people could browse directly to the site at http://your-site.org/home. They would see, in the center of the home page, that first blog entry. Drupal's general settings allow you to identify your home page; renaming a numeric page simply makes it friendlier for your users.
If, instead, you simply wanted the whole blog to be the home page, then you would skip the numbers, and not bother with a rename, as linking the front page to http://your-site.org/blog would accomplish that.
Drupal's real power comes in when you realize that, with the CCK module, you can make your own content types, and that can be very easy. A press release will have a similar format to a blog item (title, content). So you can create a type called press_release and link a page to it: http://your-site.org/press_release. All new press releases that you post to the site from Create Content/Press Release will appear there.
Blocks
Blocks are boxes that can be placed on one or more pages or associated with one or more content types. They usually appear in the left or right sidebars. Strategically associating blocks with particular content can be a subtler way o offer navigational aids. For example, you might want to have a block with current open positions appear on your "About" page, but not necessarily with your blog. Or you might not want the job listings to appear on pages describing your services, instead featuring a "Donate Now" box. This flexibility allows you to align content in ways that make sense for the different audiences with varying interests that your site will attract.
Taxonomies
All of the above is fine for sites without a lot of content. But, once you have a library of blog entries, press releases and documents to share, you'll want to give your visitors a way to find what they're looking for that doesn't involve inordinate amounts of scrolling. Search is a no-brainer, but even more important is to organize your content with meaningful labels. For this, use the Taxonomy module.
Taxonomies allow you to tag or classify your content using hierarchal terminology. For example, if your NPO serves the homeless, you might have papers on poverty and employment, descriptions of available shelters and programs, job opportunities, and much more. You can break this content down into meaningful categories, then assign sub-terms in each category. Once the taxonomy is in place, you can assign menu items to terms in your taxonomy, thus aggregating all of the relevant content on a single page. You can set up menu blocks for the sub-terms and assign each block to it's category page. The result is a content rich, drill down web site.
That's it for navigation. Next week, we'll talk about Themes and ways you can make your Drupal site distinctive.
Last week, I kicked off this series on setting up a basic web site with Drupal, the popular open source Content Management System. This week we're going to take a closer look at Modules, the Drupal add-ons that can extend your web site's functionality. One of the great things about Drupal is that it is a popular application with a large developer community working with and around it. So there are about a thousand modules that you can use to extend Drupal, covering everything from document management to payment processing. The good news: there's probably one that supports the functionality that you want to add to your web site. Bad news: needle in a haystack?
A potentially easier way to add extra functionality to Drupal is to download a customized version, such as CiviCRM or Open Atrium. We'll discuss those options later in the Drupal 101 series.
Core Modules
Drupal comes with a number of built-in modules that you can optionally enable. Some are obviously useful, others not so much. Here are some notes on the ones that you might not initially know that you need:
Primary content types like blog, forum and book offer different modules for user input. They can be combined, or you can pick one for a simple site. Since the differences between, say , a blog (individual journal that people can comment on) and a forum (topical posts that people can reply to) are less distinct than they are in other CMS's, you might want to pick one or two primary content types and then supplement them with more distinctive ones, such as polls or profiles.
Enabling contact allows your users to send private messages to each other on the site, as well as allowing you to set up site-wide contact forms.
OpenID allows your users more flexibility and control as to how they log into your site. I can't see a good reason not to enable this on a public site. Since more and more people have profiles on social networking sites and Google, tools like Facebook Connect or Google Friend Connect should be considered as well.
By default, Drupal asks new users for a name and email, but not much else. With the Profiles module, you can create custom fields and allow your users to share information much as they would on a social network.
Taxonomy is also recommended, and I'll talk more about that next week.
Throttle should be used on any high-traffic site to improve performance.
Use Trigger if you want to set up alerting and automation on your site.
More than some CMS's, Drupal is a content-centric system. It doesn't simply manage content, but the web interface is structured around the content it manages: content types, content metadata (taxonomies), content sources (RSS feeds). Out of the virtual box, Drupal has content types like blog entries, pages and stories. Each content type has a data entry form associated with it. So, if you create a number of stories, and you want to read them all, then you can browse to the page "story" and they'll all be listed there. CCK helps you create additional content types and use a fairly robust form-builder to customize the screens.
The Views module lets you customize the appearance and functionality of many of Drupal's standard screens, and to add your own. Unlike CCK, which is limited to the default layout of content types, Views lets you seriously customize the interface. One easy reason to install Views is in order to take advantage of the Calendar view, which gives you not only a full page, graphical calendar to add events to and display, but also sidebar calendar widgets and upcoming event lists.
Here's a tip: setting up the calendar view is reasonably tedious. The best write-up explaining it (for Drupal 6) is here: http://drupal.org/node/326061. Drupal's documentation is okay, but this is step-by-step. It does miss one step, though, which is to add the "Event Date - From date" and "Event Date - To date" to the Fields listing (with friendlier titles, like "From" and "To"). Otherwise, calendar items show on the day they were submitted instead of the day that they are occurring.
There's a good case to be made that these two modules should be folded into Drupal's base package, because, in addition to providing very powerful customization features to the core product, there are a whole slew of additional modules that require their presence. If you plan to install a number of modules and/or customize your site, these are pretty much pre-requisites, so just grab and install them.
What-You-See-Is-What-You Get, or Rich Text Format (RTE) editors transform Drupal's default data input boxes into flexible editors with Word-like toolbars. The WSYIWYG module lets you install the editor of your choice. I've done well with FCKEditor (recently rebranded CKEditor, thank you!). The WYSIWYG module lets you work with multiple RTE packages and strategically assign them to different fields and content types. Most RTE editors are very configurable, but note that, in addition to installing the modules, you need to install the editors themselves, so follow the instructions carefully.
If you're building a community site, with hopes of having lots of interactive, social features, Organic Groups gives you the flexibility to not only create all sorts of groups and affiliations on your own, but let your users create their own groups as well, much like Facebook does. For an interactive site, this is essential.
E-Commerce/Donations
Many modules are available for either integrating with Authorize.net or Paypal, or setting up your own e-commerce site. The aptly named e-Commerce module and Ubercart are among the better known and supported options.
Drupal fans: what modules do you recommend? Which do you install first? Leave your recommendations in the comments.
Next week, we'll talk about menus, blocks and taxonomies: Drupal 101: Navigation.
Last week, I shared my impressions of Google Wave, which takes current web 2.0/Internet staple technologies like email, messaging, document collaboration, widgets/gadgets and extranets and mashes them up into an open communications standard that, if it lives up to Google's aspirations, will supersede email. There is little doubt in my mind that this is how the web will evolve. We've gone from:
The Yahoo! Directory model - a bunch of static web sites that can be catalogued and explored like chapters in a book, to
The Google needle/haystack approach - the web as a repository of data that can be mined with a proper query, to
Web 2.0, a referral-based model that mixes human opinion and interaction into the navigation system.
For many of us, we no longer browse, and we search less than we used to, because the data that we're looking for is either coming to us through readers and portals where we subscribe to it, or it's being referred to us by our friends and co-workers on social networks. Much of what we refer to eachother is content that we have created. The web is as much an application as it is a library now.
Google Wave might well be "Web 3.0", the step that breaks down the location-based structure of web data and replaces it completely with a social structure. Data isn't stored as much as it is shared. You don't browse to sites; you share, enhance, append, create and communicate about web content in individual waves. Servers are sources, not destinations in the new paradigm.
Looking at Wave in light of Google's mission and strategy supports this idea. Google wants to catalog, and make accessible, all of the world's information. Wave has a data mining and reporting feature called "robots". Robots are database agents that lurk in a wave, monitoring all activity, and then pop in as warranted when certain terms or actions trigger their response. The example I saw was of a nurse reporting in the wave that they're going to give patient "John Doe" a peanut butter sandwich. The robot has access to Doe's medical record, is aware of a peanut allergy, and pops in with a warning. Powerful stuff! But the underlying data source for Joe's medical record was Google Health. For many, health information is too valuable and easily abused to be trusted to Google, Yahoo!, or any online provider. The Wave security module that I saw hid some data from Wave participants, but was based upon the time that the person joined the Wave, not ongoing record level permissions.
This doesn't invalidate the use of Wave, by any means -- a wave that is housed on the Doctor's office server, and restricted to Doctor, Nurse and patient could enable those benefits securely. But as the easily recognizable lines between cloud computing and private applications; email and online community; shared documents and public records continue to blur, we need to be careful, and make sure that the learning curve that accompanies these web evolutions is tended to. After all, the worst public/private mistakes on the internet have generally involved someone "replying to all" when they didn't mean to. If it's that easy to forget who you're talking to in an email, how are we going to consciously track what we're revealing to whom in a wave, particularly when that wave has automatons popping data into the conversation as well?
The Wave as internet evolution idea supports a favored notion: data wants to be free. Open data advocates (like myself) are looking for interfaces that enable that access, and Wave's combination of creation and communication, facilitated by simple, but powerful data mining agents, is a powerful frontend. If it truly winds up as easy as email, which is, after all, the application that enticed our grandparents to use the net, then it has culture-changing potential. It will need to bring the users along for that ride, though, and it will be interesting to see how that goes.
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A few more interesting Google Wave stories popped up while I was drafting this one. Mashable's Google Wave: 5 Ways It Could Change the Web gives some concrete examples to some of the ideas I floated last week; and, for those of you lucky enough to have access to Wave, here's a tutorial on how to build a robot.
Google is on a fishing expedition to see if we're willing to take web-surfing to a whole new level. My colleague Steve Backman introduced us to Google Wave a few months ago. I attended a developer's preview at Techsoup Headquarters last week, and I have some additional thoughts to share.
Google's introduction of Wave is nothing if not ambitious. As opposed to saying "We have a new web mashup tool" or "We've taken multimedia email to a new level", they're pitching Wave as nothing less than the successor to email. My question, after seeing the demo, is "Is that an outrageous claim, or a way too modest one?".
The early version of Google Wave I saw looked a lot like Gmail, with a folder list on the left and "wave" list next to it. Unlike Gmail, a third pane to the right included an area where you can compose waves, so Wave is three-columner to Gmail's two.
A wave is a collaborative document that can be updated by numerous people in real-time. This means that, if we're both working in the same wave, you can see what I'm typing, letter by letter, as I can see what you add. This makes Twitter seem like the new snail mail. It's a pretty powerful step for collaborative technology. But it's also quite a cultural change for those of us who appreciate computer-based communications for the incorporated spell-check and the ability to edit and finalize drafted messages before we send them.
Waves can include text, photos, film clips, forms, and any active content that could go into a Google Gadget. If you check out iGoogle, Google's personal portal page, you can see the wide assortment of gadgets that are available and imagine how you would use them -- or things like them -- in a collaborative document. News feeds, polls, games, utilities, and the list goes on.
You share waves with any other wave users that you choose to share with. User-level security is being written into the platform, so that you can share waves as read-only or only share certain content in waves with particular people.
Given these two tidbits, it occurred to me that each wave was far more like a little Extranet than an email message. This is why I think Google's being kind of coy when they call it an email killer - it's a Sharepoint killer. It's possibly a Drupal (or fill in your favorite CMS here) killer. It's certainly an evolution of Google Apps, with pretty much all of that functionality rolled into a model that, instead of saying "I have a document, spreadsheet or website to share" says "I want to share, and, once we're sharing, we can share websites, spreadsheets, documents and whatever". Put another way, Google Apps is an information management tool with some collaborative and communication features. Google Wave is a communications platform with a rich set of information management tools. It's Google Docs inverted.
So, Google Wave has the potential to be very disruptive technology, as long as people:
Adopt it;
Feel comfortable with it; and
Trust Google.
Next week, I'll spend a little time on the gotcha's - please add your thoughts and concerns in the comments.
Internet culture addicts like me have taken gleeful note of Mashable's campaign to rid the world of Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 6. Anyone who develops public web pages (and cares if they are compatible with other and/or modern browsers) is sympathetic to this cause. The hoops that we have to jump through to make our pages look acceptable in IE6 while taking advantage of the nearly decade old CSS positioning commands are ridiculous. When I was doing web consulting a few years back, IE6 compatibility coding generally took up about 20% of the total project time.
Microsoft's response to the Mashable campaign was to defend the brontosaurus-like pace of corporate IT Departments in performing application updates. Here's the pertinent MS Spokesperson quote:
“[Corporate IT departments] balance their personal enthusiasm for upgrading PCs with their accountability to many other priorities their organizations have. As much as they (or site developers, or Microsoft or anyone else) want them to move to IE8 now, they see the PC software image as one part of a larger IT picture with its own cadence.”
Huh! This from the company that kept threatening to drop Windows XP support in order to force us to Vista.
But, sarcasm aside, this is a flawed argument. The "cadence" in which an IT Department upgrades software should be influenced by changes in the general technology landscape. Business (and nonprofit!) networks use the Internet. Those networks are already integrated with the world at large. Since the web browser is one of the primary interfaces to external data, it's easy to make the case that it needs to be upgraded more often than word processors and spreadsheets.
Many major webs sites are designed with CSS 3.0 formatting. IE6 doesn't fully support the 11 year old CSS 2.0 specification. IT departments that aren't prioritizing this upgrade are providing poor support for users who need such websites. They're also creating more work for themselves supporting the workarounds. Large companies might have far more computers to upgrade, but they also have software that automates that process. The key issue is training. Microsoft dramatically changed the user interface of Internet Explorer with version 7, but there are options to default back to the IE6 layout. The hassle of learning the new interface is certainly not as bad as not being able to properly use websites that are designed for more modern browsers.
What really irks me is the way that Microsoft has described the "IE6 must die" campaign' as being intended to appease "technology enthusiasts". The push to move users to modern browsers is not about my desire to use non-business applications like Facebook, Digg and YouTube (and classifying these web sites as "non-business"is a pretty debatable point as well). It's about my desire to benefit from advancements in web technology, and provide my staff with new tools that promote their mission-focused work.
With the HTML 5 specifications about to become the new standard, IE6 is obsolete. The types of things that IE6 doesn't support are the things that are making web-based applications viable, affordable alternatives to traditional software. Microsoft has been in the driver's seat of the companies that set the pace of technology advancement. They should be consistent in supporting the migration and adoption to those new standards, given a reasonable amount of time. Eight years is reasonable. IE6 must die, and Microsoft should join the chorus.
"80% of your time will be spent writing good content." I must have repeated this phrase 100 times this year in various presentations and website project meetings. Logically, I know its a solid statement, but it's always good to be reminded by just doing it.
It's now taken me weeks longer than expected to write stuff for our new FivePaths company website under development. Sometimes I just want to say on one page, "We build websites, databases, and know a lot of important technology stuff. Maybe we can help you." Its hard to look inside yourself, and the team and projects you know so well, and generate compelling ways to describe it.
So naturally, I have procrastinated. Many times now. And sometimes while procrastinating, I looked for magical software tools to help me... somehow... Surprisingly to me, there are some:
We often recommend storytelling as a compelling frame for writing content for the web. Storyist is a terrific Mac software designed to help novelists generate and organize their story. Of course I bought it immediately, and lost at least 30 minutes exploring the metaphor of the story for our website. I could generate "characters" (ie clients, partners, etc), "plot" (our services), organize images, and walk through all of these as "chapters", organizing and reorganizing what comes first and next. I have tried organizing my thoughts in similar ways using a wiki, but found the story frame much more useful.
Here we have a software combining index cards with surveying. I could set up a free account online and start generating cards containing categories and subcategories, and mix them around in different ways. Very compelling, especially when you are as overwhelmed as I was with all the great ways to organize website concepts. Its like magnetic poetry for building taxonomies. Particularly cool and essential for real card sorting activities, you can invite folks to sort your cards the way it works best for them, and then analyze the results.
Distractions really help fuel procrastination. When writing web content, there is nothing more distracting than the other five screens I have open on my computer (my email, Facebook, calendar, etc). Sometimes I need help focusing on just one thing at a time. WriteRoom basically brings your Mac back to the days when portable computers meant two people and a large cardboard box. It gives you a nice black screen to type bright green letters. Everything else is gone from sight. This is as far as I got, although I understand you can change the colors of the background and font to a less headache inducing combination.
Ok I actually never tried this one, but it seemed really compelling as I was copy editing the About section for our new site, for the third time. They promise grammar, spelling and style checking, as well as a dictionary/thesaurus feature. They have software to fit various writing "profiles", including business and hi-tech writing. I wonder if it is like online translations, which still struggles to tell the difference between someone from Berlin and a jelly doughnut. Ich bin kein Berliner.
I'm following up on my post suggesting that Wikis should be grabbing a portion of the market from word processors. Wikis are convenient collaborative editing platforms that remove a lot of the legacy awkwardness that traditional editing software brings to writing for the web. Gone are useless print formatting functions like pagination and margins; huge file sizes; and the need to email around multiple versions of the same document.
There are a lot of use cases for Wikis:
We can all thank Wikipedia for bringing the excellent crowd-sourced knowledgebase functionality to broad attention. Closer to home we can see great use of this at the We Are Media Wiki, where NTEN and friends share best practices around social media and nonprofits.
Collaborative authoring is another natural use, illustrated beautifully by the Floss Manuals project.
Project Management and Development are regularly handled by Wikis, such as the Fedora Project
Wikis make great directories for other media, such as Project Gutenburg's catalogue of free E-Books.
Almost any popular Wiki software will support the basic functionality of providing user-editable web pages with some formatting capability and a method (such as "CamelCase") to signify text that should be a link. But Wikis have been exploding with additional functionality that ramps up their suitability for all sorts of tasks:
The Floss Manuals team wrote extensions for the Open Source TWiki platform that track who is working on which section of a book and send out updates.
TWiki, along with Confluence, SocialText and other platforms, include (either natively or via an optional plugin) tabular data -- spreadsheet like pages for tracking lists and numeric information. This can really beef up the value of a Wiki as an Intranet or Project Management application.
TWiki and others include built-in form generators, allowing you to better track information and interact with Wiki users.
And, of course, the more advanced Wikis are building in social networking features. Most Wikis support RSS, allowing you to subscribe to page revisions. But newer platforms are adding status updates and Twitter-like functionality.
Before choosing a Wiki platform, ask yourself some key questions:
Do you need granular security? Advanced Wikis have full-blown user and group-based security and authentication features, much like a standard CMS.
Should the data be stored in a database? It might be useful or even critical for integration with other systems.
Does it belong on a local server, or in the cloud? There are plenty of great hosted Wikis, like PBWorks (formerly PBWiki) and WikiSpaces, in addition to all of the Wikis that you can download and install on your own Server. There are even personal Wikis like TiddlyWiki and ZuluPad. I use a Wiki on my Android phone called WikiNotes for my note-keeping.
Are you already using a Wiki? You might be. Google Docs, with it's revision history feature, may look more like a Word processor, but it's a Wiki at heart.
An award-winning friend of mine at NTEN referred me to this article, by Jeremy Reimer, suggesting that Word, the ubiquitous Microsoft text manipulation application, has gone the way of the dinosaur. The "boil it down" quote:
"Word was designed in a different era, for a very specific purpose. We don't work that way anymore."
Reimer's primary reasoning is that Word was originally developed as a tool that prepares text for printing. Since we now do far more sharing online than by paper, formatting is less important. He also points out that Word files are unwieldy in size, due to the need to support so many advanced but not widely used features. He correctly points out that wikis save every edit, allowing for easy recovery and collaboration. Word's difficult to read and use Track Changes feature is the closest equivalent
Now, I might have a reputation here as a Microsoft basher, but, the truth is, Word holds a treasured spot on my Mac's Dock. Attempts to unseat it by Apple's Pages, Google Docs and Open Office have been short-lived and fruitless. But Reimer's absolutely right -- I use Word far more for compatibility's sake than the feature set. There are times - particularly when I'm working on an article with an editor - that the granular Track Changes readout fits the bill better than a wiki's revision history, because I'm interested in seeing every small grammatical correction. And there are other times when the templates and automation bring specific convenience to a task, such as when I'm doing a formal memo or printing letterhead at work. But, for the bulk of writing that I do now, which is intended for sharing on the web, Wikis put Word to shame.
The biggest problem with Word (and its ilk) is that documents can only be jointly edited when that's facilitated by desktop sharing tools, such as GoToMeeting or ReadyTalk, and now Skype. In most cases, collaboration with Word docs involves multiple copies of the same document being edited concurrently by different people on different computers. This creates logistical problems when it comes time to merge edits. It also results in multiple copies of the revised documents on multiple computers and in assorted email inboxes. And, don't forget that Track Changes use results in larger documents that are more easily corrupted.
A wiki document is just a web page on a server that anyone who is authorized to do so can modify. Multiple people can edit a wiki concurrently, or they can edit on their own schedules. The better wiki platforms handle editing conflicts gracefully. Every revision is saved, allowing for an easy review of all changes. Earlier versions are simple to revert back to. This doesn't have to be cloud computing -- the wiki can live on a network server, just as most Word documents do.
But it's more than just the collaborative edge. Wikis are casual and easy. Find the page, click "edit", go to work. Pagination isn't an issue. Everything that you can do is usually in a toolbar above the text, and that's everything that you'd want to do as well.
So when the goal is meeting notes, agendas, documentation, project planning or brainstorming, a wiki might be a far simpler way to meet the need than emailing a Word document around. Word can be dusted off for the printed reports and serious writing projects. In the information age, it appears that the wiki is mightier than the Word.
Next week I'll follow up with more talk about wikis and how they can meet organizational needs.
I recently wrote about the potential for shared outcome reporting among nonprofits and the formidable challenges to getting there. This topic hits a chord for those of us who believe strongly that proper collection, sharing and analysis of the data that represents our work can significantly improve our performance and impact.
Shared outcome reporting allows an organization to both benchmark their effectiveness with peers, and learn from each others' successful and failed strategies. If your most effective method of analyzing effectiveness is year to year comparisons, you're only measuring a portion of the elephant. You don't practice your work in a vacuum; why analyze it in one?
But, as I wrote, for many, the investment in sharing outcomes is a hard sell. Getting there requires committing scarce time, labor and resources to the development of the metrics, collection of data, and input; trust and competence in the technology; and partnering with our peers, who, in many cases, are also our competitors. And, in conditions where just keeping up with the established outcome reporting required for grant compliance is one of our greater challenges, envisioning diving into broader data collection, management and integration projects looks very hard to justify.
So let's take a broader look this time at the justifications, rather than the challenges.
Success Measures is a social enterprise in DC that provides tools and consulting to organizations that want to evaluate their programs and services and use the resulting data. From their website:
Success Measures®, a social enterprise at NeighborWorks® America is an innovative participatory outcome evaluation approach that engages community stakeholders in the evaluation process and equips them with the tools they need to document outcomes, measure impact and inform change.
To accomplish this, in 2000, they set up an online repository of surveying and evaluation tools that can be customized by the participant to meet their needs. After determining what it is that they want to measure, participants work with their constituencies to gather baseline data. Acting on that data, they can refine their programs and address needs, then, a year or two later, use the same set of tools to re-survey and learn from the comparative data. Success Measures supplements the tools collection with training, coaching, and consulting to insure that their participants are fully capable of benefiting from their services. And, with permission, they provide cross-client metrics; the shared outcomes reporting that we're talking about.
The tools work on sets of indicators, and they provide pre-defined sets of indicators as well as allowing for custom items. The existing sets cover common areas: Affordable housing; community building; economic development; race, class and community. Sets currently under development include green building/sustainable communities; community stabilization; measuring outcomes of asset programs; and measuring value of intermediary services.
Note that this resources nonprofits on both sides of the equation -- they not only provide the shared metrics and accompanying insight into effective strategies for organizations that do what you do; they also provide the tools. This addresses one of the primary challenges, which is that most nonprofits don't have the skills and staff required simply to create the surveying tools.
Once I understood what Success Measures was offering, my big question was, "how did you get any clients?" They had good answers. They actually engage more with the funders than the nonprofits, selling the foundations on the value of the data, and then sending them to their grantees with the recommendation. This does two important things:
First, it provides a clear incentive to the nonprofits. The funders aren't just saying "prove that you're effective"; they're saying "here's a way that you can quantify your success. The funding will follow.
Second, it provides a standardized reporting structure -- with pre-developed tools and support -- to the nonprofits. In my experience, having worked for an organization with multiple city, state and federal grants and funded programs, keeping up with the diverse requirements of each funding agency was an administrative nightmare.
So, if the value of comparative, cross-sector metrics isn't reason enough to justify it, maybe the value of pre-built data collection tools is. Or, maybe the value of standardized reporting for multiple funding sources has a clear cost benefit attached. Or, maybe you'd appreciate a relationship with your funders that truly rewards you with grants based on your effectiveness. Success Measures has a model for all of the above.
Even if you will never tweet, it's obvious that Twitter is a source of useful information, and, in some cases, a more timely source than traditional search engines and media. If you use Firefox as your main web browser, and have the popular Greasemonkey add-on installed, which serves as a kind of macro language for the web, then the Twitter Google Results script adds some real power. Any Google search you perform will also search Twitter, posting the top five relevant results. Why is this useful? Well, when we heard rumors that a bomb had gone off somewhere near our Bozeman, Montana office, the Twitter results had current info and links that weren't indexed by Google yet
Namechk checks for your preferred username on a slew of Web 2.0 sites, from Bebo to Youtube. I found this useful to reserve peterscampbell at a few sites that I want to use but hadn't signed up for, and to learn that some other guy named peterscampbell had already grabbed it at Youtube, where I had used a different loginname... snap!
This is a tip, not a tool - if you've been stymied by Facebook's recent changes to how it handles updates, you can make a lot more sense of it by making lists of related friends, and then filtering the updates by group. Click on Friends and the "Create New List" button is at the top of the screen. I have lists for family, nptech, Boston friends, SF Friends, and a special one called "no tweets", which filters out everyone who cross-posts all of their Twitter updates to Facebook (my default view). Keeping up with all of this info is always a challenge, so the ability to filter out the echoes is a must.
Exhibit is a web site that lets you upload spreadsheets, maps and other data to an information rich, filterable, active web page that can then be shared. If your org works with a particular environmental cause, seeks a cure for a disease, or supports a particular community, you can share data about your cause dynamically and expressively with this amazing site.
Google revolutionized email with GMail, the first email platform in decades to question the basic assumptions about how email should work (by filing important email into folders). They're about to do the same thing with Voicemail. A year or two ago, they purchased Grandcentral, a service that allowed you to route multiple phone numbers to one shared voicemail box. A few months ago, they opened the revamped Google Voice to existing Grandcentral customers, and, surprise, it looks a bit like GMail.
When I look at GMail, Google Voice, and the recently announced Google Wave, a real-time communication and collaboration platform, and then picture these all integrated into a Google Apps account, it becomes clear that our phone systems are moving into the cloud as fast as our servers are, and, while it is always that controversial proposition of Google giving you stuff in return for the right to market to you based on all of your data, it still looks like they are poised to offer one of the most powerful, integrated communication platforms that the world has ever seen.
Have you run into any awesome things lately worth sharing? Leave a comment!
When comparison shopping, we have come to expect that companies will make outlandish claims about their stuff. Sometimes it's frustrating, but most of the time, I continue on numb to the distorted claims clinging to the brands all around me. For nonprofits in the business of providing a social benefit, its especially disheartening when I read similarly exaggerated claims about their accomplishments.
I see credible communication as a social benefit. Sandra Stewart, a colleague over at Thinkshift Communications, shared a beta "Credibility Quotient" to help quantify the credibility of initiatives. I found it useful as I thought about building nonprofit websites, and the kinds of messaging and communications strategies that become implicit in the architecture of the sites I build.
Thinkshift identifies several factors in determining credibility, including provable claims, accurate data, attention to challenges, relevance to the audience, consistency with actions and more. These factors and definitions show the different perspectives we can take when considering whether web content is credible, and helps to determine where to focus to fix any problems. For me, the details of the scoring and weighting are less important than the exercise in understanding what credibility factors are most important, and how to read content for these factors.
A recent day started with a call from the tech manager at an organization I work with. A variation on their website domain name had turned up as a porn site. What to do?
This particular organization has high advocacy visibility, including right now. Rather than foul play relative to current news, it appeared that a paper company had been squatting on the name for a few years. Companies may do this to pick up pay-for-click revenue on people coming to the page by mistake. In other cases, it may have hopes of eventually forcing the legitimate organization to buy the name.
Some thoughts about this type of situation.
First, be proactive. In this case, we had registered a bunch of domain names for this organization. We had considered what other names constituents might go looking, and we also reserved some other name variations for future initiatives. When I looked at what names the client "owned," I felt reassured we had been proactive back when and over the years.
On further reflection about the name we missed, however, I saw what we had overlooked. It is not enough to just think about what an organization's constituents might go looking for based on organizational communications. As web search has grown, you also need to consider what random people further out from the core constituency might go looking for. In this case, we had the ".org" and ".net" version of this name (not the organization's main name at all), and the bad guys had grabbed the ".com" for themselves. I and they had probably reasoned back then, since no one would think of them as a company, no need to get the ".com" names. But if your organization is prominent, then surely it is worth the $10 a year per name or less to register more names. I wouldn't consider it squatting if these are variations on your organization's unique name and identity.
Another phenomenon are "typosquatters." People who grab versions of your name that someone might misspell. We have all had that experience. "www.googgle.com" instead of "www.google.com" maybe.
Second, when something like this happens, plan your response carefully. It is easy to find out who does have the name. Your domain registrar (godaddy, network solutions, gkg.net, etc) will have a "whois" function, or go to whois.net. Then, research the name owner and see who else has complained about them. Immediately going to a lawyer to write a letter might cause the name holder to realize they had something useful. They might set a steep price for recovery. This on top of your own legal fees. Other folks' experience suggest that sometimes these shadowy companies might just let a bunch of names lapse, and you can grab them back when the registration expires. It’s a chance, and one to consider before rushing in.
Third, sometimes a gentle approach works. An organization for whom we were creating a first site, found that its exact acronym with the .org was owned by a corporate entity related to the game maker Atari. From the company's work, it seemed possible that they had an interest in that name. Even so, we approached them in an open way, describing the organization's mission and non commercial use. Lo and behold, we got the name back at no cost at all. Go Atari?
Fourth, don't wait around before registering your new names. For a project last year, as the site was being developed "off line," we kicked around the various names to be used. The name was obscure enough that we knew we didn't have to worry too much about competing interests. We didn't register it because we were still finalizing the choice. As the site got closer to launch, the client probably started listing the name here and there. A few days before we were finally ready to register the name, it got taken. And taken by another entity with no relationship to the client's type of work.
These guys probably had web search tools looking for references to web domains that were not actually registered and grabbing them. This story also ended well. We researched these guys and found they did have a real address and a stated pledge to not take names that reflected another entity's business. They gave up the name at no cost.
Fifth, consider establishing your rights to the name. How do you do establish that the name goes with your organizational work? Well, more entanglement in legalities, but it might make sense to trademark your organization's name. Should you need it, this can give you some rights. There is a generally accepted policy for resolving disputes over domain names. See http://www.icann.org/en/udrp/udrp-rules-24oct99.htm which a legitimate company will adhere to. This will not give you the right to collect damages but it won't cost a lot and could help you to get your name back.
The three client situations I mention range over a lot of what could happen and I hope give some ideas how to prevent problems. When my buddies recover their name variation from porn site, I'll update this post. Meanwhile, I don't consider this exhaustive advice, and wonder what other experiences readers may share.
Laura let everyone know last week that Idealware's web site is up for a major upgrade, coming soon. The Idealware blog won't be left behind -- we're happy to announce new bloggers and some other important changes that coincide with the Web Site update. Here's what you'll want (and need) to know:
Last week, we talked about 
"Show Options" link on your results page? Do a search for whatever interests you and try it (it's located right under the Google logo). This will add a left navigation bar with some very useful filtering options. Of note, you can narrow to a trendy real-time search buy clicking on "Latest" under "Any Time"; choose a date range,filter out the pages that you've seen, or haven't seen yet - how useful is that for finding that page that you googled last week but didn't save? The funny thing is that Google has an "Advanced Search" screen, which, of course, can do many things that this bar can't (such as searching for public domain media).
But if you're the slightest bit of a power user, or you work in an environment where users share mailbox folders or use Exchange's Public Folders, than keeping track of all of those folders can get a bit tedious. 
That's what the Shortcut view is for. Buried below the Mail, Calendar and Task buttons, you can move it up to the visible button list by right-clicking on the bar area (in the lower-left hand corner of Outlook 2003 or 2007's screen) and choosing "Navigation Pane Options". Highlight "Shortcuts" and then click "Move up" enough times to get it in one of the first four positions. Click OK, then click on the "Shortcuts" bar. From here, you can add new shortcuts and, optionally, arrange them in shortcut groups. You can rename the shortcuts with more meaningful titles, so that, if, say, you're monitoring a norther user's inbox, you can give it their name instead of having two folders named "Inbox". One tip: to add shortcuts to a group, right-click on the group title and add from there. 
I'm wrapping up the Drupal 101 series with some talk about Drupal themes, and some additional info on topics that we've already covered. The goal of these posts is to give new Drupal administrators an idea about how Drupal works, and some pointers to the key add-ons and resources in the broad Drupal ecosystem. For reference' sake, we started with 
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