Best of PowerfulCMS 2008

With over fifty sites built last year, I would like to nominate the top sitesfor each category – built by the team at PowerfulCMS. I will add the reasons for recommendation along withrecognising the contribution or innovation of the primary team member.Each of these sites are coded as per the current Drupal standards (5.x or 6.x) with all content modifiable with the Drupal CMS:

1.E-commerce Sites: Nominees in this category are – Mojodownunder, XL32, Sterlingcurrency, and Gotofamousfootwear (created online for training purposes). Surprisingly only a handful of e-commerce sites were built on Drupal, despite the ease and flexibility of Drupal. Many businesses are unaware that e-commerce sites can be built with Drupal and tend to use Oscommerce, until they realise that they need to make significant additions to get SEO aspects of Oscommerce to for products to be easily found in Google, Yahoo or other search engines.

The winner in this category is Sterlingcurrency, for its wonderful zoom technology on the product detail page  that allows you to look at every scratch on each unique coin that is sold on this site.Also the common zoom view of product views page  uses Lightbox and jquery making this an awesome user experience. The award for this category goes to Sergei.

2.B2B Web Presence sites: Nominees in this category are – HotIdeas, High5Software, Appistry, Vantagewealth, Powerfulcms, Newseoecom, GPS.  The runner up winner in this category goes for “Meet the team” view done for Vantage.

The winner in this category is Hotideas for its amazingly simple design, with three separate looks – home page, top level and detail page. However, the feature for this nomination is this form and its embedded audio and multi part form. This award for this category goes to Mel for the form implementation.

3.B2C Web Presence Sites: Another hot category with many sites competing – Rockwelltrading, Think nursing, Addsup, CPCA. Explo, Anovim, Mexican immigration, Celebrity, greytalent, swinecast and more. This is very competitive category and the runner up here is Thinknursing with multi site Drupal implementation.

The winner in this category is CPCA, for it creative use of colours and logos across the site, all driven by Drupal categories. Beside the creative use of multi categories, video and photo galleries,the rationale for this nomination is for the brilliant use of webform. The award for this goes to Leon for his brilliant implementation of this webform in Drupal 6.x.

4. Learning Management Sites: This is new category and one the entire team felt challenging and rewarding. The sole nomination and award in this category goes to Pathways, which was a migration from ASP based application to Drupal. This site has multi content types – courses, articles, videos, pdfs, audio coming together with individuals who can take a course, take a test (n) number of times and get a pass/fail score, tracked in the LMS. The LMS keep track of the most recent score for each participant. On the list of enhancements for this year is adding e-commerce for courses and possibly integrating with alternate LMS engines.The award in this category goes to Sergei and Leon (a joint award)

5. Social Networking Sites: An exciting category with many people interested in creating Drupal based social networking sites, the nominations in this category are for kangaruni, thejapanesepage, cleftworld and YBM.

The award in this category goes to Kangaruni, for its sheer volume of content types, layout styles, features – organic groups, forums, blogs, personal pages, IM and most notably the google map integration with content types, that takes street addresses and converts it to coordinates displayed on the fly based on data in the content management system. Another joint award for this site goes to Sergei and Leon.

Another emerging category for 2009 is migrations from proprietary CMS to Drupal, with the number of proprietary vendors realizing it is futile to keep up with Drupal, Joomla and the opensource CMS options. With Joomla sites migrating to Drupal for the vast number of modules available for social media, 2009 is bound to be a hectic year with hopefully more LMS, business presence and social networking sites.

In the upcoming blog, I look forward to contributions from the team along with tips, tactics to enhance your drupal implementation. Thank you for an amazing year.