Review of Buzzr, A Drupal Website Builder
Buzzr Is a New User-Friendly Hosted Version of Drupal
Posted August 9, 2010 – 6:03 pmBuzzr is a new hosted website building platform based on Drupal, a popular open source content management system (CMS).
Buzzr: A Drupal Website Builder
Buzzr aims to make it much easier to build websites in Drupal by creating a user-friendly front end for the Drupal CMS. In a sense, Buzzr is a sort of WordPress-for-Drupal.
However, while WordPress is primarily designed to build blog-based websites, Drupal is fundamentally a more powerful and versatile website development platform that can be used to make virtually any kind of website. However, with this richness comes complexity that puts Drupal out of reach for many people.
Buzzr is trying to capture some of the superior functionality of Drupal while improving the interface to make it accessible to a much wider range of people. I think they have been largely successful in doing so.
Buzzr has been developed by Lullabot, a renowned Drupal development shop based in Rhode Island. Buzzr is in the early stages of roll out.
Buzzr is similar in concept to Drupal Gardens.com which recently launched in open beta. DrupalGardens is another simplified version of Drupal that has been developed by Aquia, another leading company in the Drupal community.
In the past week, I have tried using both Buzzr and Drupal Gardens to see how they work. I use Drupal to build most all my sites and I was interested to see how these new hosted Drupal platforms compared with the ‘real’ Drupal.
I will be posting separately about Drupal Gardens at some point, but this post is focused on the features of Buzzr.
Goal: Build a Simple Content Site
To make my testing as real as possible, I tried to put up the same relatively simple content website on both Buzzr and Drupal Gardens. This is a site is actually want to build, so I was looking to see if either platform would make it easier for me to create than doing so on a normal Drupal setup.
The site I tried to build had the following characteristics:
- How-to oriented website with ~20 web pages
- Webpages are largely text-based with a few images per page
- Design is a fairly basic 3-column layout
- Needs to support running advertisements, including header ad, ads in sidebars, and ads in body text
- Need to be able to fine-tune page layout, text styling, etc., ideally using custom CSS to augment default options
- Needs to support ‘taxonomy’ – the Drupal term for ‘tags’
- Needs to support ‘views’ – a powerful Drupal method for organizing content into lists
The above features are slightly more complex than a basic content site you might see for a small business or an artist or a personal website, but not a whole lot more. As well, it specifically includes some features (esp. ‘views’) that are somewhat unique to Drupal.
This type of site would be relatively easy to build in regular Drupal (at least it would be if you already knew Drupal and had a development environment in place to do it which I do). This type of site cannot be built in WordPress – the problem being that WordPress has no well functioning equivalent to Drupal’s Views module.
Buzzr Capabilities
Buzzr (and Drupal Gardens) have a wide range of built-in capabilities and I wasn’t able to look at all of them. Since I was trying to build a real website as quickly as I could, my focus was mostly on the capabilities required for getting this site built. As a result, there are a goodly number of Buzzr features – e.g., image galleries – that I didn’t look at in any depth.
Here’s a overview of Buzzr’s capabilities grouped into 4 major buckets. Again, I had a specific focus, so your experience may differ from mine, particularly in areas like ‘capabilities’ where specific website requirements are likely to vary quite substantially.
Admin User Interface
Buzzr has a very nice looking user interface (UI) for the ‘admin’ side of using the platform – basically the menus and other stuff you use to build and manage your website.
The buzzr admin UI consists of up to 3 menu bars across the top of the page, plus various editing and configuration layouts on the main page. You can find many pics and videos of the Buzzr admin setup in the Buzzr 101 section of the site.
I would say this interface is pretty darn nice. It is very graphical and much more intuitive than Drupal’s native admin controls which can be awfully cryptic.
The main admin options of ‘add content’, ‘manage content’, ‘design and layout’, ‘manage users’, and ‘site settings’ seem pretty sensible.
I won’t go into each piece part, but I wasn’t crazy about some of the screens. For instance, I did not like that there is no ‘menu’ option directly in the webpage editor – and there is no way to modify a menu title separately from the page title. As a result, when you initially create and save a page, the entire page title pops up in your main navigation menu. You can visit the ‘navigation menu’ page to change this and have it be subordinate to another menu item, but this isn’t too satisfying – and you still can’t change the menu item title there either.
Buzzr Admin Interface
A general criticism I’d offer of the layout is the size of the admin menu bars: they take up too much screen real estate. With all 3 menu bars open, they take up the top 180px of your screen. If you are on a 1080px or 1024px tall screen, these menus are taking up nearly 20% of total height – and that doesn’t include your browser frame and whatever toolbars you’ve got going. As well, many of the admin page layouts are too generously proportioned – e.g., the ‘Manage Static Pages’ page. This all needs to be more economically done to avoid too much scrolling and loss of focus.
Functionality
One way that Buzzr (and Drupal Gardens) keep the Admin UI clean and simple is that they support only part of the entire range of functionality available in Drupal proper. Since Drupal proper supports an enormously wide range of capabilities through ‘contributed modules’, this is a necessary thing for Buzzr to do.
The question is: has Buzzr chosen the right functionality to include to meet the needs of the most people? I think the answer to that is probably yes – or at least it is within striking distance. Since I know they will be adding additional features over time – e.g., I was told that they will be adding groups, calendars, contact page, and color picker functionality later this month.
The main things I personally needed to build my site were these:
- Basic content pages supporting text and images
- Upload and manage images for webpages
- Taxonomy (aka, ‘tags’) to allow grouping pages together
- ‘Views’, a special Drupal module that allows you to create lists of pages based on certain parameters (e.g., a tag)
Before I run through these quickly, I wanted to note a very important feature of Buzzr that was not required for my website, but that looks like it would help lots of other folks: their innovative Form Builder. This is a really outstanding Buzzr feature that combines two very complicated Drupal capabilities – CCK and content type manager – into one simple to use interface. This module allows you to very easily build a ‘custom form’ that contains any number or type of content fields. Using this tool you can create, for instance, a complex custom page for product spec sheets or product reviews or any other similar type of page that requires structured content. As an added bonus, Buzzr / Lullabot have contributed this module code back to the Drupal community in the shape of the Form Builder module.
Basic content pages Buzzr handles basic content pages very nicely using the ‘static page’ content type. A ‘static page’ contains several fields: page title, body text, tags, and date and time. It does not contain a ‘menu’ field as mentioned above. You are able to upload images to a static page.
In addition, Buzzr offers a number of additional pre-defined content types, including image galleries, blog posts, ‘press post’, and ‘custom pages’. The WYSIWYG editor is very nicely implemented. There is an option to switch to an HTML editor, too.
Upload images In the WYSIWYG page editor, Buzzr allows up to easily upload an image from your hard drive. The uploader allows you to adds image a title, tags, and other descriptors. You can also change the image size to fit properly on your page. You can also adjust aligned (e.g., left, right, center).
The part I did not understand was how the image library worked. While it worked fine to upload into the page directly, I would have actually preferred to upload into an image/media library so I could reuse the image on multiple pages with just the one upload. The images I uploaded directly to a page did not show up in the media library and I could see no other way to upload an image. Perhaps this is in the tutorials somewhere.
Taxonomy (aka ‘tags’) Tagging is a pretty basic capability that most all website builders offer and Buzzr is no exception. Buzzr allows you to tag every piece of content (pages, images, etc.) with one or multiple tags. These are nicely displayed on each page in the default templates.
That said, I would have liked to see a bit more full featured implementation of tagging. For instance, there is no master screen where you can look at and refine your tags and you can have only one tagging ‘vocabulary’ whereas Drupal proper and Drupal Gardens allow you to have more than one. This is useful if you want to tag one type of thing (e.g., pages) with one set of tags while tagging another set of things (e.g., images) with a different set of tags.
‘Views’ capability One of the best features of Drupal is the ‘Views‘ module which allows you to create lists of content based on user-specified parameters. For example, you can create a list of all content pages with the tag ‘websites’ or all pages of a certain content type or published by a certain author. In Drupal proper, Views is extremely flexible and supports very complex parameters.
My needs with my sample website were more modest: In Buzzr, I simply needed to create pages based on individual tags. So, for example, I needed a page that lists all pages with the tag ‘websites’; and another showing all pages tagged ‘SEO’, etc.
Unfortunately, I almost was not quite able to do this in Buzzr. Buzzr does have a simplified Views module, but it turns out to be a bit too simplified. Instead of generating a page with just posts tagged ‘websites’, it created a page with links to all tags used on the websites. While I maybe could have worked with that, it turns out each of these subpages contained the same complete list of all posts on the site. I’m thinking the feature isn’t working quite right – or maybe I didn’t configure the page correctly.
[Update: Via email, Buzzr CEO Ed Sussman has offered several clarifications about the Buzzr custom pages (aka 'simple views') feature. First, he said that there is a bug in Custom Pages that is causing the tag links not to work properly. He says this will be fixed shortly. Second, he noted that they have not enabled the ability to generate 'single tag pages' using Custom Pages, but that this is built into the code and may be enabled in the future. Lastly, he pointed out that Lullabot / Buzzr actually built the underlying code for this feature and contributed it back to drupal.org as a contributed module called Simple Views. This looks like a really fantastic module that hugely simplifies the well known 'Views' module in Drupal. They are to be commended for contributing it back to the community.]
Design
Buzzr has some very good design tools, but overall I would say it needs some further work. It is probably a step or two behind the theme editing features that I saw on Drupal Gardens.
The design interface has several parts: ‘select style’, ‘navigation menu’, ‘design tool’, ‘design (advanced)’, and ‘widgets/layout’.
‘Select style’ allows you to select from a dozen or so ‘themes’ (the Drupal term for ‘template’). These all have basically the same page layout and vary mostly in terms of the ‘skin’ – meaning background colors, font styles, and colors, etc.
‘Navigation menu’ allows you reorder items in your main navigation menu via a drag-and-drop interface. As far as it goes, this works very nicely actually, but it looks like you can have only 1 menu and that’s not ideal for many situations.
‘Design tool’ allows you to change various theme relates settings. For instance, the global font and font size are set here. Backgrounds for the header and the site are also set here. The site logo and favicon are also here. This is good stuff, but pretty basic stuff.
‘Design (advanced)’ is a simple interface that allows you to see and edit the entire CSS file associated with your theme. You cannot change basic page layout here, but you can change lots of other styling elements of your website. For people who know CSS, this is great, but others will struggle to know what to do here.
‘Widgets / layout’ is one of the most interesting parts of Buzzr. It is basically a drag-and-drop tool that allows you to manipulate the layout of your website. Here is where you determine how many columns your site has. It also has a bunch of pre-defined widgets (called ‘blocks’ in Drupal-ese) which you can add or move around on your page. These widgets are basically small content blocks which you can put into your columns. The pre-defined widgets include ones for text or images, for tags, for a mini-gallery slideshow, and so forth. There are also widgets showing users and social widgets for Facebook, Twitter, etc.
In terms of my specific needs, it appears that most of what I needed design-wise could be done reasonably easily in Buzzr. The drag and drop widget tool is very effective.
One sticking point was reformatting the header to get a 728x90px ad to fit alongside the site name and site slogan. With some encouragement from CEO Ed, I found that I could manipulate the CSS for the header to achieve the desired positioning. This involved firstly adding a new block to the page via the ‘widgets’ editor and then using the ‘design (advanced)’ editor and Firebug (a Firefox plug-in) to modify the CSS for the default header block and my new ad block. With a bit of fiddlign, I was able to put the two blocks side by side in the header.
Help / Support
Buzzr provides pretty strong and easy to understand documentation. The website provides a very helpful how-to section plus hands-on demos in a series of nice video tutorials. Since the whole thing is designed to be straightforward and user friendly, this documentation is plenty to get you going in building out your website.
While the documentation is quite good, a concern I would have is that there is no obvious venue for support beyond this info – like if you still don’t understand something, how do you get help? On Drupal Gardens, they’ve got very active user forums to help you out. I found these invaluable as I worked through building out a site there. It may be that Buzzr is intended more as a platform for Lullabot clients than as a general use website builder. If that’s the case, they don’t make that obvious.
But I can’t complain too much about support because I received an immediate response to the one query I did send them via email – and that came from their CEO, no less. Obviously that’s not scalable, but it does suggest their commitment to the product.
[Update: Ed Sussman, the Buzzr CEO, has now sent along numerous emails clarifying various points about Buzzr. He's been very helpful.]
Pricing
Buzzr has a tiered pricing scheme that seems fairly reasonable if you are planning to put up one or two sites. Prices start at $19.95 for the ‘Bronze’ plan. This seems designed for a smaller site typical of a small business or independent professional. If you have a larger site and require more hosting resources, then you can choose one of the 3 more expensive plans ranging from $39.95 to $119.95 per month.
The monthly price includes on-going upgrades of the Buzzr platfrom. This is a major benefit over a self-hosted version of Drupal since, unlike WordPress, the upgrading process is not automated and really quite a pain in the a**.
Buzzr has a 7-day trial period where you can demo the platform. This a great way to try out the platform and see if it is a good fit for your needs. I used only this option because it took just a few hours to conclude that I wouldn’t be able to do what I wanted to build out my site.
Even if I’d been able to get the website up and running, pricing might have been an issue for me because I would have wanted to host multiple small websites on Buzzr. Via email I learned that you may be able to get a price break if you put up a number of websites.
Conclusions
Buzzr appears to be very promising Drupal website builder. It is a relatively new product, but has many outstanding features and excellent potential.
Via email, CEO Ed Sussman offered this comment about Buzzr and it’s future:
“Buzzr is designed to be a real time saver for the average website owner who wants the power of Drupal in a more user-friendly package. We’re very pleased with the capabilities of Buzzr today, but we’ve got many important enhancements in the pipeline for the coming months. When the fully packaged version of Buzzr is released in September, you’ll see some really great new time saver tools beyond anything now in the public beta. I think people will be excited and they will clearly see things that set us apart from Drupal Gardens.”
Unfortunately, despite the great features, I was not able to get my website built in Buzzr. It currently doesn’t quite support my needs. Some of the problems I had were:
- Couldn’t generate ‘views’ type pages for individual tags
- Couldn’t [easily] manipulate layout of header to include an ad [as described above, this was eventually accomplished via custom CSS]
- Couldn’t change menu item titles [turns out this is wrong - titles can be edited, but the edit screens are very confusing and should be clarified]
- Cost to host multiple small websites on Buzzr is too high [but it should be noted that Buzzr costs are comparable to other similar tools - they appear high only in the context of my specific set of needs which calls for many small sites]
Note: Text in brackets above are edits / clarifications added after the original post went live.
Despite these issues, I would definitely recommend that others try Buzzr and see what they think. There are a number of really strong positives and surely the platform is going to continue to expand and improve.
Here’s my take on Buzzr’s notable features:
- Modern, very easy to use admin user interface that makes Drupal very accessible to non-programmers
- Strong set of Drupal functional capabilities that will meet the needs of many websites
- Excellent Drupal feature innovations in both the ‘simple views’ and ‘form builder’ modules that simplify and enhance Drupal usability
- Commendable generosity on the part of Buzzr / Lullabot to contribute their module innovations back to drupal.org
- Nice mix of content types and other specific features out of the box
- Built-in support for image galleries with lightbox-type overlay/slideshow (caveat: I didn’t test this too thoroughly)
- Simple, easy to understand theme structure (in contrast to Drupal Gardens which has mind bogglingly complex themes)
- Beautiful drop down menus based on Drupal ‘Nice Menus‘ module (note these may require a bit of CSS styling to get the right look)
- Excellent drag-and-drop widgets tool that makes it very easy to organize your website page layout
- Nice social media, newsletter, and other community features
If your website needs match up well against Buzzr’s current capabilities, you could be up and running with a high quality Drupal-based site in a matter of hours. Since using Buzzr is so straightforward, it’s well worth giving it an hour or two to see if it’ll work for you.
2 Comments
Hmm im actually looking to do a very simple website for my parents Embroidery business. I think i might have to do a bit more reading on this Buzzr. Great post, Keep them coming!!
Thanks so much for sharing some reviews about this Drupal Website Builder. So pleased to have gone over this post.