Dave Chakrabarti Footnotes in Technivism

This is an overview of my work with Drupal's Mailhandler module, designed to allow content creation on a Drupal (or CivicSpace)site via email. If we combine this functionality with a mailing list address that's authorized to post content, we have the first steps towards an integrated forum and mailing list system (the next stage would be to develop a system that automatically emails any created content to the mailing list address).

I've been thinking and tinkering with solutions to achieve true forums / listserv integration for a long time now, along with many other techies working to network large groups of people. The idea is that an online forum (or bulletin board) could coexist with a listserv (a traditional mailing list), transparently integrated.

Perhaps the single most important feature that Drupal or CivicSpace offer for search engine optimization is the ability to create clean URLs. This feature alone is enough to warrant the switch from Mambo, and is probably the most important SEO option a true CMS can offer.

Built-in website translation into other languages has always been something I've been interested in. For true translation (including content translation) a website has two options: human translation, and automatic translation through a language engine.

Since search engine optimization / marketing (referred to as SEO or SEM) is both an interest of mine and a requirement for my sites, it was natural that I looked for strong search engine optimization options built-in when I was looking for a CMS.