Posted under Drupal Development, Design & Build on February 29th, 2012 by Philip Allen / No Comments

The latest version of mBlog has been launched for Drupal, and yes, you are using it right now.

Designed to engage customers and make the most of Social Networking, mBlog v4.0 is heavily influenced by Eye Tracking research in Google’s official Blog.

mBlog follows a more traditional pattern of giving away all of the content in one go, removing the use of summaries.

This means viewers can pretty much scroll top to bottom to find and read new information without leaving that page.

Google’s Eye Tracking study suggests that this is pretty much the case with new visitors to their site.

A large proportion of users’ time can clearly be seen digesting the Blog home content, rather than scanning for new sections or interesting content and jumping to a new page. Users only need to click when they reach the bottom of the page to navigate to new entries.

mBlog is a fully featured robust system, deployable as a content managed Blog or News system and includes some great new features designed by our Drupal team:

Improved Social Media Sharing

The most popular Social Media sharing tools feature at the top of each post rather than the bottom after multivariate testing showed an improvement in engagement.

Social media integration means you also only have to add content once in your Blog and then feed into your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts automatically.

Display Full Posts By Default

Engagement increased when we tested full posts –v- collapsed summaries so all posts display at 100% with pagination based on three posts per page.

The full sized page display provides greater visual impact when using larger images, and also engages the viewer straight away because they can scan the whole article rather than being forced to show more.

Reply To Individual Comments

The mBlog “Reply” feature removes the vague progression of threads seen on conventional Blogs by allowing users to reply directly to individual comments.

Conversations become fluid and threads are more organised.

Expandable Category Menus

mBlog’s dynamic menu system allows parent, child and orphan categories to be built in seconds through the CMS with no specific Web skills required.

The menu hierarchy can be re-organised at any point and Users can collapse or expand sub-menus at the click of a mouse – ideal for keeping the menus Users want above the fold.

Plug ‘n’ Play Block Modules

Choose to activate a number of modules including Authors, Tag Cloud, Archive, Google Maps and Facebook Friends.