Recently, a WordPress-based web portal was built for a technology company to serve the needs of several thousand partners and resellers worldwide, which included providing access to confidential documents for registered users. The new portal replaced a very basic site they had built using Salesforce’s “Partner Portal” offering. As such, we had to evaluate the options for logins to the new WordPress site:
The shift from human support to automated support has become the butt of many comedians’ jokes and the differentiating factor in the advertising of select service-oriented companies. But is all self-service support bad? Personally, I think there are some situations where self-service support can actually be superior to speaking to a live person—for both users and businesses. To illustrate my point, I’ll share a couple of examples with you.
We recently uncovered an excellent example of the immature state of Drupal 7 versus its well-established predecessor Drupal 6. We noticed early on in a recent project that the underlying data structure for content had changed in Drupal—there is now a component of the content-element data object that stores a Language ID for each value, which didn’t exist in D6 (granted, it’s always set to “undefined”, but it is there). This means that, in theory, individual content elements can have different language values, even in a single node (e.g. /node/123 can be displayed with English or French content).
