This document discusses how a content management system (CMS) can be one of the best marketing tools for a business. It summarizes some key benefits of a CMS, including allowing businesses to tweak layouts and designs, add or remove functionality, and gain insights from user data. The document then provides examples of how the Drupal CMS allows customization of layouts and blocks, flexible display of content through views, user roles and permissions, SEO features, reporting, and rules-based behaviors. It concludes that a CMS gives businesses immediate control over small changes while freeing up developer time for more strategic projects.

1. Your CMS is one of Your Best Marketing Tools Elias Dabbas April 28, 2010 Web Analytics Wednesday - Dubai

2. “Product” is still one of the central themes of any marketing effort Image: soopertutorials.com

3. What Kind of Product? Features Flexibility Speed Adaptability

4. Traditional Cycle

5. How About…

6. 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

7. How Drupal Does It

8. Layout: Blocks System Zones

9. 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

10. 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

11. Example 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_accounttwitter_account ON twitter.screen_name = twitter_account.screen_name LEFT JOIN drup_twitter_usertwitter_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 = 10 minutes Long time

12. User Roles & Permissions Control which type of user can perform which action Create new types of users and define them by the actions they are allowed to perform

13. 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 example mysite.com/[user-name]/[article-title]

14. Reporting Different statistics and reports on key events on the site What people search for Error pages

16. When someone registers, display a certain message on the page

18. Thousands of modules that extend and improve functionality Tagging systems Views enhancements Social networking Content display Mail and communication Search

19. 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!

20. Thank you