Hi everyone,
I just finished a small blog integration for testing with DropInBlog in my Sparkle Site. You can see it in www.poultrysounds.com and then select Blog from top menu. I know very little html and almost no CSS. Their support is great and they helped me on the fly with the CSS part of it. Lets see how it behaves in the following weeks! Hope this is useful for you as well. I’ll share what I did in case you need it !
Cheers!
BTW, I’m currently testing the interface for comments in the Blog, so if you post a comment that would help me to evaluate that part as well…
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Thanks for sharing @mariovn. It looks a really good and simple setup that just works! I’m thinking how I could justify the yearly price to a client?
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@FlaminFig Well, that depends on what your customer intends to do with the blog. Blogs are very importante for SEO optimisation but it comes at the cost of posting useful content to your audience, regularly. It also needs to be connected to a stratey to collect leads and to make sales. Otherwise, it’ll be just losing money…
@mariovn, Yep totally agree. Bogging has no real purpose (other then just to share) for an online business if there is no marketing strategy behind it so you won’t get an argument out of me! 
Knowing that WordPress is a free blogging platform that just about all clients know about it could be a challenge justifying the yearly price to them, but I guess that is another story in itself!
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Interesting, thank you for bringing it to my attention.
One caveat: blog posts will not be able to be searched using Sparkle’s new search feature.
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Hi Folks,
Jesse here, I’m one of the co-founders of DropInBlog.
Please post here if you have any further questions about integration. We’re growing quite quickly and trying to roll in any features and ideas to suit different needs on different platforms. So please let us know of any integration questions or suggestions.
Here’s a couple answers from some questions in another thread:
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Are there other templates? Besides the default “inherit your styles” template we’re working on a couple more templates that will be released soon. The most exciting is this grid / cards style template that we’ve gotten a lot of requests for. It will look something like this:
@DropInBlog, Hi Jesse… Thank you in joining us to further educate us on your product! I have a few questions…
- How does your blog system compare to the likes of WordPress on the security front?
- Could you give us further insight on your white label offer?
- On the Lite plan is that 250 posts/month or per year?
- Importantly is your blog mobile-friendly?
The other thing is what is your take in how we can on sell your service knowing our clients are always saying to us we can use WordPress because it is free! 
Thanks.
My pleasure… Here’s your questions:
How does your blog system compare to the likes of WordPress on the security front?
If you have ever managed a large number of WordPress sites you will know that WP is constantly under attack and very vulnerable. There are endless “ways in” for the bad guys, usually through random plugins that have holes in them. As someone who has worked extensively with WordPress I can tell you that “done right” it can be “fairly secure”. But in the end you are hosting a very complex application on your server and when a breach happens often you don’t know it right away and hackers usually upload scripts that send out spam from your server for their benefit and other uses of your resources.
Since DropInBlog’s core interface is not hosted on your server it inherently doesn’t have these security risks. If we were to get hacked it doesn’t give the hackers access to your site at all as we are just feeding you the final data. So from a high level architectural standpoint DropInBlog is much more secure.
Could you give us further insight on your white label offer?
While this may change, our current white-label offering applies if you buy a minimum of 5 accounts from us. Then we can create a branded white label interface for your clients and all billing goes to you and you bill your clients. The initial pricing is the same as the retail but if you reach higher numbers of accounts it becomes discounted. You can charge whatever you want.
On the Lite plan is that 250 posts/month or per year?
It’s total posts. And I can tell you most people never hit this. Also you can toggle between plans at any time. (it just prorates)
Importantly is your blog mobile-friendly?
If your website is mobile friendly then DropInBlog is mobile friendly. The beauty of DropInBlog is you are not running another template / theme / header & footer. DropInBlog “drops in” to your existing layout on a single page like blog.html so there are not two systems to manage / skin / update etc.
How we can on sell your service knowing our clients are always saying to us can we use WordPress because it is free!
I think I should probably do a blog post on this at some point “The real cost of WordPress”.
- Initial setup. Setting up DropInBlog is much faster than Wordpress. There is no database to setup, themes to install, plugins to download. You just drop in some code. How much time do you spend on this / charge your clients?
- Theme Design. DropInBlog uses your existing theme. There is nothing to redesign / skin / re-theme. How much time do you spend to create a matching theme and how much do you charge your clients for that?
- Theme updates. Change a menu item? new logo? don’t forget to also update this in your WordPress theme.
- Ongoing Maintenance. Who is going to update the WordPress install? How about the plugins? Who is responsible when an update fails and the blog goes down? Who was responsible when the 5.0 update happened and many of the themes were not compatible? What happens at 6.0? What happens when the new intern is trying to “make a quick change” and deletes the blog files or database? who’s backing up this data and code? Who fixes it? What happens if the installation gets hacked like mentioned above? What happens when spam is being sent from the server and now their hosting IP is blacklisted and their email is bouncing? Who handles that? how much does it cost? Who administers for the ibuprofen? This is the cost of free.
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@DropInBlog, A big thank your for your detailed reply, appreciated!
I hear you about WordPress - a platform that I have never recommended to my clients because of everything you said and more! I have taken onboard what you have said and will take a further look into your offering… thanks!
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