Would you like to be able to update your Drupal site and automatically send those updates to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, Ning and dozens of other sites?

This tutorial will show you how.

Our first part will be to create an RSS feed to export new posts. From there we'll use Twitterfeed.com and Ping.fm to distribute the posts to all our social networks.

We teach three kinds of website software: Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress. At each class people bring different preconceived notions:

• Drupal: "This stuff is really hard, right?"
• Joomla: "This stuff is a quirky, right?"
• Wordpress: "This stuff isn't very powerful, right?"

Our job is to convince them they're wrong. One of the reasons people think Wordpress isn't powerful is because they believe it can't be used to build an ordinary website with static pages.

This week's tutorial explains how to add metadata to your Drupal site. By default, Drupal has no fields for metadata. Check the source code at http://drupal.org and you'll see what I mean. To fix that issue, we recommend a module called Nodewords.

Following on from other newsletters where we showed you how to set up Joomla on a Mac and also how to develop locally and moving your site to a live server, this week we're going to walk you through installing Joomla locally, on a P.C..

We're going to use WAMP for this tutorial.

WAMP stands for "Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP" which are the different elements that allow you to run Joomla on your computer.

Here's how you do it:

Unlike Joomla or Drupal, Wordpress doesn't have a default contact form. However, there are many good options to choose from.

We're going to recommend a plugin called "Contact Form 7".

Would you like to be able to update your Joomla site and automatically send that update to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, Ning and dozens of other sites?

This tutorial will show you how.

Our first part will be to create an RSS feed to export all our new posts. From there we'll use Twitterfeed.com and Ping.fm to distribute the posts to all our social networks.

This tutorial was requested by a student who is learning the Drupal basics. They turned on "Clean URLs" in the Drupal admin area and were surprised to see that the URLs remained largely unchanged:

• Old: /?q=node/3
• New: /node/3

The student's comment was:

"that's still a silly address for my About Us page. I want the address to be /about-us/."

The solution is the "Pathauto" module and let's show you how to set it up:

This tutorial will show you how to take an RSS feed and import it into your  Joomla site. Each item on the RSS feed will become a separate Joomla article. We use this technique for a couple purposes:

• Distributing our content to other Joomla sites. For example, we use this technique to showing these tutorials on Alledia.com.
• Importing blogs and news on a particular topic from other sites. This way people can read them all in one place.

We're going to use a component called 4RSS from 4RSS.com.