Two providers of integrated solutions: ocPortal, an open-source Content Management System, and Bitnami, which makes "stacks" for easy installation of web applications, have partnered to release a "stack" for ocPortal 4.1.10. Jointly developed/tested by both companies, users of almost any background can now easily download and run ocPortal on the "big three" operating systems, Windows, Linux, and Mac.
I've never agreed and disagreed so much with one article as this one from The Sydney Morning Herald, Drive your own website.
I agree...
I hate being held to ransom. And I'm sure you do, too. But that's the scenario you're creating when you hand over your website to a web designer or developer and relinquish control over when and how you can change your content...
...That's why I think it's vital for small-business owners to use their own content management systems (CMS). My recommendation is to initially use a designer to create the overall look but after that you at least want to be able to change the text on your website whenever you want.
I disagree...
If you are planning to use a free CMS, such as Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla, expect a steep learning curve and a lot of time poring through forums and blogs trying to figure out how to insert that picture just the way you want.
On the other hand, monthly subscription-based models can offer more flexibility. While you might baulk at being tied to a monthly subscription, the benefit is this is usually accompanied by technical support - so you can call or email for help
The fact of the matter is whether you're going to be using a CMS that is propriety, open source, or subscription based...there is always a learning curve involved. The advice I often give to those looking for a CMS is to look at which CMS meet the requirements then worry about the licensing along with the how/where the site will be hosted. The fact is that if the CMS doesn't meet your requirements...no subscription-based model for that CMS is going to meet your needs. Also, if you think Wordpress has a steep learning curve...you likely haven't done your homework on Web content management systems. Just my opinion...
I have never had good luck hosting my Drupal sites on shared hosting plans. My last venture into budget hosting was a disaster with the hosting company locking me out of my own account due to too many requests to the remote database. The truth is that I've only been happy with running my personal Drupal sites on virtual private servers (VPS). However, I'm having a difficult time justifying my yearly costs of using a VPS to host my sites.
Last year I was one of the beta testers for Acquia's Drupal distribution and the Acquia Network. I was evaluating Acquia's products and services for a potential intranet project at work. For this particular project, unfortunately, it looks as if Acquia or Drupal wasn't the right solution. Our regional folks wanted a solution similar to Microsoft's Sharepoint that is more integrated with Microsoft Office and heavily featured in document management. That's alright though because there are a number of smaller intranet projects at work where Drupal is the perfect solution and a lot of
Yesterday, PHP-Fusion announced that someone had hacked into their site and changed the download link for PHP-Fusion Version 7.
Hello all,
We had an issue a few days ago where a malicious person gained
access to our site as a super administrator via a weak account/gained
password. They apparently changed the download link of PHP-Fusion
version 7 to spendspace and it was packaged as a .rar file.If you downloaded one of these files, please reinstall your entire site using a fresh copy from SourceForge.
While this isn't a good thing, it is a positive that PHP-Fusion disclosed the possibility that the link led to a version of PHP-Fusion that may have been maliciously changed. I can recall a number of other projects (open source and propriety) that have found their source code made vulnerable by someone intruding into their servers. What is always important to customers in these cases is disclosure and transparency. So far, PHP-Fusion seems to be doing the right thing.
However, as of this Thursday morning...it looks like PHP-Fusion's hosting company has suspended their account. At the time of this writing, there is no words given as to the reasons for the suspension. I suspect the suspension is likely to be security related. Perhaps, we'll see an announcement at SourceForge on the status of PHP-Fusion if their home site doesn't come back online soon.
Ironic how the world can change so quickly. Yesterday, the CIO of my organization began enforcing the use of anti-virus software on all of our Linux clients and servers. Today, I read that Apple is telling its Mac users to purchase anti-virus software. Something nasty is brewing out there.
Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult.
This Drupal site of mine has taken quite a bit of beating the past couple weeks. While Mollom has been protecting this site well enough from the comment spammers, it isn't designed to prevent the bots from trying to ping me so much. It has been an incredible experience to see the bots try to open every possible URL and directory here at CMSReport.com. But probably the real stress on the site has been my testing of numerous contributed modules that are still under development. Probably using a production server to test new modules isn't the smartest thing for anyone to do, but it does provide a nice adrenaline rush from time to time.
To make a long story short, I'm testing a number of ways I can use a Web content management system more efficiently to run this site. I also want to do some restructuring of the site so that I have more flexibility in the look and feel of the site as well as how the content is delivered. For the most part, I'll be using Pathauto, Views, Panels, and one of the aggregation modules. I'm currently testing the FeedAPI module for aggregation, but none of the aggregation related modules really do what I want them to do. I'll put up a site recipe in the next month or two on the modules I finally settle on to support this site.
Now it is time for me to go. Evidently, one of the modules I've installed is causing some cron issues. Am I having fun, yet? Yes, I am.
Alldrupalthemes.com did a performance comparision between Joomla 1.5 & Drupal 6.1. As the author of the post infers, the numbers collected may not mean much to the user in the "real world" and limitations in the test results should be noted. Nevertheless, numbers that compare Drupal and Joomla performance are always interesting.
The conclusions drawn from the results are:
Yesterday evening, I spent about two hours updating my site from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 RC 4 for another weekend test at my site. About 30 minutes was spent backing up the site and installing Drupal 6. The rest of my time was spent with tweaking things via Drupal's admin menus as well as looking at the contributed modules and themes available for D6. I'm currently using the Salamander theme and only two contributed modules, Image and CAPTCHA. I also spent some time placing snippets of PHP code in my blocks to replace many of the functions I was doing with Views. The end result is that with only two hours of work, I am just fine running CMSReport.com on Drupal 6
As I said last week, it's amazing how many people overlook the power of Drupal...even without its contributed modules. Yes, I'll be glad when the Views, Panels, and even the TinyMCE contributed modules are ready to use with Drupal 6. But I've always looked at contributed modules as modules of convenience and not necessity. I'm convinced that most people do not have to wait for Views to move onto Drupal 6. Views only automated a number of SQL tasks that can easily be done with PHP. Some Drupal users are going to object when I say it is "easy" because they are not PHP developers, but you know what, I'm not a PHP developer either. In fact, I'm kind of slow, but I seem to manage along just fine with D6.
As usual during this period of the development process, people are wondering if the new version of Drupal is ready to be released or if there will be another release candidate. Whether this is the last release candidate or not for Drupal 6 I'm not sure anyone can really say. All I will say is Drupal 6 feels ready to me.
Recently posted at XOOPS.org was a how-to for optimizing XOOPS on your server.
Optimizing Xoops, its modules and your server - Sometimes, people are telling that Xoops is rather slow and it can be true but there are ways to improve things.
Instant Zero is in charge to maintain some websites using Xoops, so we decided to share with you our knowledge in this domain and we hope that you will find it useful.
In this article, and in 5 points, you are going to see what you can do for your site.