As the wide world of the web continues to grow, companies are looking harder and harder at transparent user interfaces across many content management systems (CMS). One does not simply want a WordPress blog anymore, they want a blog, a forum, a social networking site, a digg-clone and many other things all tied together.

Why? Because not very many CMS’s can handle all the work of the many that exist. Although you can work Drupal to do a lot of powerful things, you cannot simply make it a full time blog as great as WordPress while maintaining a great forum experience like VBulletin and a digg clone like Pligg. Every content management system has its strengths and weaknesses but many designers want only the strengths.

How do you gain such a power? By integrating them all together of course! This, however, isn’t a task to be taken lightly. You must handle a lot of user data and rely on a single password record for all of the CMSs. Typically, the way I tackle this is to take the hardest user database and use that as the core of the authentication. The other option, which is very important, is to use the database with the most users as the core.

Integration and seemless design is important for this type of site ‘network’ and we’re seeing this occur more and more on the web. Rather than having a Drupal developer build modules (or install modules) to simulate the perfect storm of websites they’re integrating all the sites together with a common design so the user doesn’t even know they’ve moved from a Pligg site to a VBulletin forum because it all looks the same to them.

There is also the concept of “single sign-on,” which is another rough point if you’re using obscure content management software. In the perfect world we want to user to register and sign into one of the sites and have total access to all the sites in the network without re-authenticating. A project in and of itself!

We’re finding this is the way to go in many situations. Users of Drupal have commented that the forum module leaves much to be desired in terms of functionality and Wordpress makes a great blog with some neat plugins to extend the blogs functionality but it’s not an E-Commerce solution either. Pligg, on the other hand, is really only good at digg-clones sites and doesn’t build a huge friends network or a social circle site, you’ve got to find other software solutions for this.

In the end, what everyone wants is to tie it all together into a “solution.” Much like Microsoft Office is a set of unrelated products brought together and forced to relate seemlessly to the user, the future of the CMS may be much the same. Plug-ins to build one site into another. You can see this already forming with some Drupal modules to plug into PhpBB and other forum software because users know “you just can’t beat a focused product” that does one thing great.

How does one know the success of an open content management system (CMS)? By the amount of quotes you get on jobs in that realm. Drupal, as many know, is a very stable and flexible content management system used by many firms and a large quantity of web developers.

The trick? Drupal isn’t a walk in the park in terms of PHP development. A new PHP programmer still picking up basic concepts will soon drown in the intensity of Drupal. Although Drupal is very clean (coding wise) and hugely extensible to the experienced PHP programmer, there doesn’t seem to be a large pool of developers.

If you know Drupal and you’re a PHP developer, this is good news for you. If you’re a PHP developer and you don’t know Drupal then here is a project for you: learn Drupal.

Over the last six months, my project at techdiversions.com has many Drupal web designers asking “wow, how can I do that for my customer?” TechDiversions uses the Drupal E-Commerce modules and exists to sell video games, but honestly, the amount of money made by the video games as compared to additional contract work for building such a site just doesn’t compare.

Video game profit margins are not the best in the world of retail but Drupal PHP development does yield better margins (but requires more design, experience and sheer brain power to develop). It’s funny to see a site that’s slowly growing its customer base have higher profit margins in contract jobs just because it shows that E-Commerce and Drupal can provide a working solution for companies around the globe.

Why are we showing off TechDiversions? If you’re a video game player then you should buy stuff from the site, but that’s not the real point. The real point is learn Drupal and develope a first class site to draw in more jobs!

If you’re a drupal developer or want to become one, you should sit down and build a few websites. You don’t have to do a full E-Commerce solution but show off your skills and build some custom modules to do something fantastic to show off your skills to potential clients.

Fortunately, MediaCrumb has an experienced lead web designer and an experienced lead developer to build full solutions for customers. But, many web designers lack the training or patience to learn PHP and tackle a drupal problem. You’ll find, as a Drupal developer, web designers sending you e-mail and asking “hey, my client needs a bit of code in this module to do…” or “can you modify a core Drupal module for my needs…” or “can I keep you in contact for future modules?”

If you want to make some good money as a web programmer/developer I suggest learning the in’s and out’s to Drupal and become a commodity to web designers around the world.