Key WordPress and Drupal features on our content-rich sites

Here are some of the key WordPress and Drupal features that we use in our DITA-based information mashups:

WordPress:

• We installed the WPAUTOP plugin. Doing that stops WordPress from inserting </p> tags in various places on the pages its displays. If you don't do this, WordPress can display the DITA XHTML pages as invalid XHTML, which causes bad results with some web browsers.
• We installed and enabled the Search Everything plugin. This allows better searching of pages and posts, and helps to make up for the fact that our taxonomies are less sophisticated on WordPress than they are on Drupal.
• We installed and enabled the Jetpack plugin, which gathers site statistics using a service provided by wordpress.com.
• We overrode the default theme CSS file (style.css) to reduce the font size of displayed pages. Without this change, the font is too large and tables, in particular, do not render well.
• We included overrides in functions.php to allow only selected pages to appear in the main menu. You need to do this if you plan to publish a DITA docset as a large number of pages; otherwise, they will all appear in the Main Menu.

Drupal:

• We enabled the Blogapi module. Currently we have our own version of this module, which fixes some bugs in the distributed version of the module, and also extends it to allow tagging of pages as they are published. This is a work in progress.
• We created custom content types for the DITAinformationcenter, Garage sample, and Grocery shopping sample structured collections.
• We enabled Google Analytics to allow the gathering of detailed statistics of site usage.
• We enabled the Views module to allow the creation of pages that display database queries of page content (for example, our Query-by-tag mechanism).