When Aaron Wall, a well known SEO expert, predicted Drupal to be the wave of the future, I was just about getting very comfortable with WordPress. At the time I felt like taking the position on the subject but restrained myself because I did not much about Drupal even through I already fell in love with WordPress. Aarron raffled some feathers for sure when he wrote:

Drupal is more powerful than what the average blogger needs to run their site, but it has so many features and options that it can allow you to bolt many things onto your blog that you would not be able to do very easily with something like WordPress or MovableType.

Back in those days, and even today to some degree, a Drupal user was/is perceived to be more sophisticated, since better knowledge of PHP and some coding skills are needed to allow Durpal to perform the miracles for you.

Whether or not I have become more sophisticated in terms of coding skills or programing is very questionable. I am however developing taste for Drupal. Today I have no choice but to wholeheartedly agree with Aaron – Drupal is the way of the future. So much so, that I am planing to convert some of my well established websites to Drupal as soon as Drupal 7 is officially released.

Why Drupal And Why Now?
It’ very simple. Durpal allowed me to do things other platforms could not. More about it in my follow up posts.

One of the most detracting factors – user interface appears to be the thing of the past for Drupal with it’s version 7 release. See the slideshow bellow to judge for yourself:

Attending Affiliate Summit East 2010 in New York City was probably one the best things I have done this year so far. It turns out that this recent Affiliate Summit East had the largest number of attendees to date. Affiliate Summit was attended by only 200 people when it was first launched back in 2003. Today it is the most important event in affiliate marketing industry.

How Did I Get There?
For the past two years I have been trying to attend the Affiliate Summit, however I had to cancel my attendance twice even though both times I was a lucky recipient of a Press Pass. Each year Affiliate Summit offers press passes to bloggers and journalists. All you need to do is to show up and cover Affiliate Summit in your publication. Press Pass offers you the same access to the show as Platinum Pass would, with some limitations (I am not quiet sure what are the limitations, but my badge said so – pictured to the right).

How Can You Get There?
The dates for the next Affiliate Summit are January 9-11, 2011 and the show will take place in Las Vegas. The registration for Affiliate Summit West 2011 is now opened and you can find more information by visiting Affiliate Summit official website. Interested in Press Pass? Submit your information here.

Interested To Become My Sponsor?
While I am thankful to Affiliate Summit for offering me the Press Pass, I think there are much better bloggers out there who can benefit from the Press Pass. I am still interested in attending all future Affiliate Summits, but as of today I cannot do it unless I find a sponsor. If you are interested to be my sponsor for the upcoming Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas please contact me to learn how you can benefit from sponsoring me.

About Post Affiliate Summit Notes On My Blog.
Going to Affiliate Summit I had every intention to cover the summit on by blog while attending it myself. I quickly realized however, that I was giving my blogging skills too much credit. So instead I decided to start on my blog something I will call from now on “Post Affiliate Summit Notes“. In these “notes” I will share about my experience, the things I’ve learned and wonderful people I have met. If you think you can benefit from these notes, please subscribe to my weekly newsletter (the form located on the top of the sidebar).

My first ever time at the Affiliate Summit is turning out to a great experience. As a newcomer to Affiliate Summit, my game plan is not extremely ambitious. I plan to finally meet bunch of people whom I’ve had pleasure to know on Internet. Meeting new people. Hopefully discover a new opportunity or two. That’s pretty much my game plan.

Literally minutes after arriving to Affilliate Summit I ran across Jeremy Palmer from Quit Your Day Job. Jeremy and his “High Performance Affiliate Marketing” e-book were quit instrumental to get me started in affiliate marketing back in 2006. To meet him right in the beginning of the summit Was definitely a treat.

I plan to attend few sessions, but I think there is nothing better than chilling at the bloggers room! Special thanks to Heather Smith of Beautiful British Columbia for being a great BlogMistress! Stay tuned for more from Affiliate Summit!

Since the arrival of WordPress 2.9, the “canonical” element is automatically generated in your website’s header. While it is an excellent way to tell some search engines not to index certain pages (lets presume for a second that search engines really listen ), there some instances you my not necessarily want the “canonical” element generated on your website. Instead of helping your SEO efforts, the canonical element may actually hurt your website.

If you use Datafeedr Plugin with current (or 2.9+) version of WordPress, you might need to consider doing some tweaking to your WordPress installation. Why? Because every “product page” on your website has canonical link element in the header pointing to your “store page”. What does it mean? Well, it is like asking search engines not to index your “product pages”.

So how do you tell your WordPress not to generate canonical link element in the header?
One way you can do it is by modifying your theme’s functions.php file – this method however did not work on my WordPress 3.0 installations.

Another way you can disable canonical element is by modifying your “wp-includes/default-filters.php” file. All you need to do is to find the line 197 that says:

add_action( 'wp_head', 'rel_canonical' );

and change it to:

//add_action( 'wp_head', 'rel_canonical' );

You can delete that line entirely if you wish. But you need to do this every time you are upgrading/reinstlling your WordPress.
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What is Datafeedr??? Datafeedr is a nifty WordPress plugn that allows you to create an affiliate website featuring thousands of product in minutes. Click Here To Learn More About Datafeedr!

If you are looking for an easy to use yet loaded with features web application to power your online store, you should definitely put OpenCart on the top of the list of software to investigate. OpenCart is a open source application that allows you to create your own online store, and it is suitable to sell goods (including digital products) for any business around the world.

Before I was introduced to OpenCart, I tried to find a suitable plugin for WordPress. Since I have been using WordPress for more than 6 years, it only made sense to try to find a plugin that would allow me to turn a WordPress installation into an online store. There are some outstanding shopping cart plugins for WordPress, by the way. However, as much as I love WordPress, I was a somewhat disappointed, mostly by it’s clumsiness  when it comes to implementing SSL certificates for WordPress.

When looking for e-commerce solution, certain criteria were extremely important to me, therefore I will base my recommendations  on these criteria – OpenCart satisfied all of them:

Easy to Install And Use…

If you have ever managed to manually install WordPres, OpenCart installation is as simple and easy. OpenCart official website also provides detailed documentation including installation instructions. Before installing OpenCart however, I would suggest you to take a free tour of both front end and the admin area of OpenCart- while this demo does not give you full privileges in the admin area, it will give you a good general idea how the software works.

Once you decide to install it on your server, it should not take more than 5 to finish the installation (minus the time needed to upload the files to your server and to set up the database).

No need to install every single version update….

The most annoying part of e-commerce plugins for WordPress that I have tried was that not every developer stayed on top of the most recent versions of WordPress. In some cases it took months before plugins were upgraded, often just in time for the latest version of WordPress to be released.

OpenCart does not rely any other application to function properly. Since I began to use it, each version of OpenCart comes with improved functionality. However your old version is likely to work just fine. You are not forced to upgrade to the most recent version if you do not want to.

Responsive Community…

Since not every web hosting provider is made equal, there might be times when you need to troubleshoot issues with OpenCart. If you are planing to use it, you might as well become a member of OpenCart Community Forums. Many times my questions were answered in the matter of minutes by the members of the forum. Often the developers themselves would answer my questions or direct me to a correct answer.

Availability of Modules and Addons…

Functionality and performance of WordPress can be improved by different plugins. This also true about OpenCart. While I personally think OpenCart presents itself quite nicely “out of the box”, there might be times you need it to do something it can’t in the out of the box state. You can find number of addons and extentions for OpenCart on their website. There are also developers (The Qphoric Domain being my favorite) from whom you can purchase other modules that can enhance your OpenCart store.

Does it work…

And by work I meant does is it really capable of selling products. Before installing OpenCart for a friend of mine to power her online store, we tried eShop plugin for WordPress for about a year. OpenCart however was able to produce the same amount of sales just in one month! To me it was one of the most reassuring factors.

Does OpenCart have any drawbacks?

The only drawback that I can think of is that OpenCart does not currently offer a way to manage an affiliate program without a third party software.  I do believe that affiliate management extension or addon will help OpenCart to “explode” in popularity. There is a sing that OpenCart will have affiliate feature in the future- the latest version 1.4.7 already includes an extension called “Affiliate” (which appears to be “work in progress”), however it is not configurable at this time, so we have to wait an see. If you need to integrate affiliate management software into your OpenCart website right away, Post Affiliate Pro seems to offer a solution.

If you have a store powered by OpenCart, please share your experiences, success stories or disappointments (if any) in the comments bellow.