Installing content management system CivicSpace

I guess I haven’t told you about my CivicSpace installation yet. Well, the process was not smooth. The installation wizard works fine if you install to the root directory. However, you get into trouble if you install to a subdirectory. Anyway, all you need to do is to enter your site details to \sites\default\settings.php file. It’s not difficult but your overall mood may be spoiled by the necessity to edit php code. I’m not a programmer and I definitely do not like editing php code even if the changes I have to make are easy.

Currently CivicSpace works fine. I expected to get much more bugs but so far only small improvements were required. CivicSpace is based on Drupal, which has a great community. Fortunately CivicSpace is compatible with most of the Drupal additional modules. This adds a lot of value to the CivicSpace content management system. Honestly speaking, I’d have uninstalled CivicSpace long ago if drupal.org did not exist. Properly written documentation is of great importance for me but the CivicSpace official site has very poor content.

How to make CivicSpace search engine friendly

First of all, it is great that it is possible to make CivicSpace search engine friendly. This is not always the case with content management systems. Changes I’ve made:

• Clean URLs.
• Pathauto module creates meaningful URLs. By the way, do not forget to change the pathauto separator from default "_" to "-".
• No "?PHPSESSID=" in URLs.

To do:

• Edit my theme files to add metadata to the pages (meta description).
• The ping module does not work. Fix it.
• Get more news sources for the news aggregator and encourage members to discuss news.
• Create more content: write articles and blog posts.