Duncan Carver's Link Management Assistant (LMA) seems to be a nice package, with more features than most Link Exchange Management software, but we couldn't get it to work in conjunction with a Drupal powered site. Drupal captures the sub-URL that LMA tries to use and returns a Page Not Found message. Unfortunately you will only find this out after doing a full install, the administration setup, and then trying to add to or view the directory listings.

The install instructions could definitely be reworked and if your server is PHPSuExec enabled, you'll have to replace any reference to permission 777 with 755. Truthfully the install instructions were a pain, as almost all the steps could have been eliminated by having already set the proper permissions in the tarball and giving a simple “unpack the tarball in xyz directory and then rename the lma directory to whatever you desire” so you weren't manually uploading specific files and directories. There could have been at least an attempt at explaining how to setup a MySQL database with CPanel, as that combination does seem to be the norm. It was also humorous that the NOTE: informing you that you need a MySQL database was at the end of the install instructions.

The only unresolved error we received was, “Column count doesn't match value count at row 1” while trying to add a manual link record. This may have been an issue with Drupal interference, but we deleted the product before resolving it, as we're a Drupal shop and had no need to do further testing once its incompatibilities with Drupal were identified.

The emails from Mr Carver are somewhat self-promotional spammy, but he is an SEO type, so it's basically to be expected.

All in all, we'd recommend it for Drupal usage if there was some way to embed an <? include "directory/resources.php"; ?> into an existing Drupal site page, thereby capturing the themed look and feel of your site.

Software Product Reviewed:

Duncan Carver's Link Management Assistant
Version 1.22, Stable
October 6, 2007
http://www.onlinemarketingtoday.com/software/link-management/