System Administration

If you have ever hosted your website on a server or virtual private server then chances are pretty high you once did or currently are using cPanel. cPanel is a graphical web-based control panel that helps site owners and administrators to quickly and easily manage their website and hosting account. It's an awesome tool that interfaces with your server to help you perform once difficult tasks such as creating databases, manage website files, as well as setting up email accounts. Unfortunately, hackers broke into a proxy server used by cPanel, Inc's technical support department and now there are concerns that a trojan may have spread onto your server.

"Painful upgrades are just one example of how selecting a Web CMS is more than just buying an off-the-shelf product. When you commit to a content management system, you're investing in the system's leadership, vision, and reliability. It's not just about how the system looks now – it's whether you can trust it to perform year after year, and upgrade after upgrade."

 -Marianne Kay, Research Analyst, "What a Failed Umbraco Release Can Teach Us About Upgrades", Real Story Group, November 28, 2012.

This month, Google announced that it has officially moved its Apache page speed module, mod_pagespeed, out of beta. For those websites running on the open source Apache HTTP Server, this module speeds up your site and reduces page load time. On the Internet, where user demand quick page rendering, this Apache module automatically applies web performance best practices to pages, and associated assets (CSS, JavaScript, images) without requiring that you modify your existing content or workflow.

MODX Revolution 2.2.5 has recently been released and includes over 150 commits designed to provide a number of fixes and improvements to the content management system. Fixes and improvements of note include improved Media Source function, Caching enhancements and a handling to prevent blank pages occurring on some older hosting environments.

A few days ago, we relaunched CMS Report with a new layout and under a much different content management system than we've used in the past. This journey began more than two years ago after realizing this site needed to evolve beyond my comfort zone. After being approached by Agility nine months ago, new ideas quickly took form and I decided to host the site using Agility's Magazine Publishing Suite. We're still smoothing out the rough edges of the new site but I think we've taken some important first steps.

According to the recent research, 64% of dissatisfied online shoppers said they were less likely to visit a slow retailer again, 62% were less likely to purchase from the site again and 48% would purchase from a competitor.

Such statistics always makes developers puzzle – from one hand, the website owner wants the application to be multifunctional and universal, from the other – it shouldn’t be slow. And the problem is always to make a solid extension work as fast as possible.

Performance optimization is a good way out in such situation. Optimizing a website, you should consider providing two factors:

Organizations deal with a lot of confidential information every day, information that is typically managed using business applications, like SharePoint. That means that properly implemented and managed security is critical to these applications.

With SharePoint, you can implement effective security, but managing it with the tools you get out of the box isn’t the easiest. Here we look at the challenges you will face managing security and permissions within SharePoint and discuss why you should make it a key element of your Information Architecture plan.

As expected, this week the Drupal development team released Drupal 7.3 and Drupal 7.4. 

Drupal 7.3, a maintenance release which fixes security vulnerabilities is now available for download.

Drupal 7.4 also fixes other issues reported through the bug tracking system.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 7.x release series, consult the Drupal 7.0 release announcement.

Andrew Lynch posted a fantastic list of 32 Web Frameworks over at memeburn.com. He starts off that list with Ruby on Rails, Django, Drupal, CakePHP...well you get the idea.

Frameworks are built on top of programming languages and provide methods of streamlining some of the more mundane and common tasks associated with web development. In essence, they allow developers to achieve more with less coding, saving both time and money. They provide a range of simple methods that help you connect to a database, authenticate users and build an admin backend, all with a few lines of code.

Be sure to read the complete story so you can see Andrew's review of 32 web frameworks that you have to choose from for your next project.

Lots of changes are starting to take place here at CMS Report. We're now running on a new version of the Drupal content management system!

Over the weekend, I decided to pull the trigger and upgrade CMSReport.com from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. It's hard for me to believe that it has been almost half a year since Drupal 7 was released. This was a frustrating upgrade for me as I've traditionally upgraded CMS Report shortly after any new release of Drupal is out. In fact, I have sometimes upgraded a site before the release is official. As a content management system, my five-year hate-love relationship with Drupal is still going on strong.

Despite the usual learning curve associated with a major Drupal upgrade, I ran into two additional problems I've never had to face with this site. First, the CMSReport.com of today is a much more complex site to run, maintain, and upgrade then it was in 2008. With the number of readers and sponsors this site now sees, I just don't have the luxury of blowing up the site and say "oh well" lets start again. Secondly, the selection of premium or contributed themes available for Drupal 7 just plain sucks (there, I said it). I must have spent half of my upgrade time just searching for and then tweaking a Drupal 7 theme. People often complain about the lag time between a Drupal release and the availability of third-party modules. In my opinion, it is the lack of theme development going on with Drupal that is the real problem with Drupal upgrades.