Saturday, December 25, 2010

Joomla, Drupal And Mambo CMS

It cannot be denied that one of the most practical business marketing solutions is web hosting. Since the demand for such has grown over time, the number of web hosting services has also increased significantly. With this, web hosting plans also become more affordable and cheaper. Due to the emergence of many hosting services, the competition has become stiff, resulting to cheaper hosting plans. In fact, there is practically no web host that offers more than $20 for web hosting services nowadays.

However, quality should never be compromised with cost. This means that aside from the cost of the hosting plan, it is also important to consider the features and the options that a particular hosting company offers.

While there are a lot of hosts that offer plans at low rates with Stone Age options, there are some web hosts that offer cheaper plans with amazing hosting features. Among these hosts is iPage hosting. Indeed, iPage is leading the hosting industry with an incomparable package. One of the features that iPage offer is Content
Management System. CMS enables individuals to build websites and powerful online applications.

One of the aspects that should be considered in a Content Management System is its ease-of-end use and extensibility. Among the most awarded content systems are Joomla, Drupal, and Mambo. These content systems are hosted by iPage as well. As such, many webmasters and owners prefer iPage hosting service because it supports content systems over a secure web server.

But, why is there a need to consider content systems in finding a web hosting service? This is because a CMS keeps track of every piece of content on your website, whatever the type of content is. Moreover with CMS, there is no need to keep track of your content because CMS does it for you. As such, the creation and maintenance of a website becomes easier with this system.

Among the different content systems, Joomla is one of the most preferred. Joomla is easy to install and easy to use. In fact, many hosting services offer Joomla in a single-click installation procedure. As such, you can get your new site up and about in no time at all.

On the other hand, Drupal is also equally favored by clients. It is a free software package that allows anyone to easily publish a wide variety of content on a website. Moreover, it also allows the client to manage and organize the contents conveniently. This is probably one of the reasons why hundreds of people are using Drupal in the management of their endless variety of sites.

Finally, Mambo is also another content system that is used for all types of websites. Mambo can be used for simple websites and for complex corporate applications as well. It is most commonly used to power government portals, ecommerce sites, community sites, corporate intranets and extranets, and even church sites.

Seven Standout Features in Drupal 7 Development

Drupal is an open source content management system written in PHP/MySQL and renowned for its modularity, simplicity, and granular control have helped make it a immensely popular open-source solution. Drupal CMS boasts of over 5800 contributed modules and variety of themes. Drupal CMS has been widely adopted by over 7.2 million sites including social networking sites, news, blogs, forums, media, entertainment, charities, politicians, corporate and many more. Drupal won the hall of fame award in 2009, several packt open source CMS Awards and won the Webware 100 awards thrice. Drupal has a large community following with over 830,000 users and 2000 developers.

Drupal has done everything right but lagged behind in a few key areas. The upcoming release of version 7 promises to correct these shortcomings and add even more power to this amazing system. The final release of Drupal 7 is expected in the early 2011.

Usability

The usability features enhanced with more menus and panels. Previously obscure settings are now easier to find and interfaces are better organized. These UX improvements will certainly helps more users to conveniently use the CMS.

User Interface: Drupal 7 is inducted with a new user-friendly interface that makes it easier for users to navigate and work on their drupal site.
Shortcut Bar: Shortcut Bar allows the user to add their own shortcut to handle and manage their site. It also allows saving variations of the shortcut bar, so as to utilize different shortcuts bars based on user activity.

Editing Page: Drupal 7 is now equipped with administrative links to edit existing page elements on each web page, without visiting an administration page first to edit. This feature provides a nice simple interface and seamless capability with editing the content on pages.

WYSIWYG editors: Drupal 7 provide improved support for integration of WYSIWYG editors.

Meta data: Drupal 7 accords permissions with more meta data capabilities.

Themes

Drupal 7 has included three new themes, Bartik, Seven and Stark. Users can now install contributed themes directly from the Appearance admin screen.

Database layer

The new release also features a new database layer providing wider support for other DB platforms and it improves scalability and integrity. For developers, they have added a query builders for INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, MERGE, and SELECT queries. Advanced queries are automatically compiled to work with the appropriate database server, which also increases the portability of drupal.

SQLite database support

SQLite allows hosting of smaller drupal installations without providing them database access.

jQuery UI

jQuery UI 1.8 added as it allows improvements to drupal's UI.

Node access control system

Node access control system has been improved and is now much better than that of Drupal 5 and Drupal 6

Popular Modules Integrated now with the Core

There are plenty of useful modules which almost every site has to download, install, enable and configure. Drupal 7 will now include some of those popular modules directly in to its core framework as they are widely used. Drupal 7 will integrate them into its core framework.

Drupal 7 has proved with its many new features and functionality that it is one of the best and flexible CMS that has taken its usability to a whole new level in drupal development. Our drupal developer is keenly awaited for making a greater and more powerful CMS to power your sites.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Samantha_Louie

Types of Content Management Systems

Today there are thousands of content management systems available on the Internet. Each serves different users by offering unique features according to their actual needs. However they all work under the same standard.

There are four main types of CMS (content management systems) in which we could cover most of which exist. These four types are:

1) Custom made (in house)
2) Commercial
3) High-end
4) Open source

Tailored
They are content management systems created within a company. Are developed by staff from the same organization. You could say that "no two are alike." As a result, all aspects of the system serving the specific needs of the company. The main theme is the development lies with the internal staff to correct the mistakes and create patches.

Commercial
Is offering content management systems is the widest since there are plenty of options either in prices, plans and features. Unlike custom-made (in house) these are rarely personalized. It is also difficult to determine the functionality of the software initially as the company has what they want you to see.

High Range
Of the thousands of systems of content available on the market only a few of them might fall into this category. One of its main features is the reliability that you have to get a robust and quality. Unfortunately this is also reflected in their high prices, since they tend to be very expensive.

Open Source
This essentially means that the software or content management system is available for anyone in the world for free. The main advantages seem obvious but the price is free! And these systems are completely customizable from its source code open. They say many disadvantages of these systems, however, strongly believe and advocate these software. For me the best that exist.

While once we know the major groups of content management systems that exist. The decision to acquire one or the other depends on your needs. If you are a company and have information technology staff, it is worth thinking about developing a house or invest in a high range.

On the other hand, if you do not have qualified personnel and the price can be an obstacle would be worth purchasing one of open source.

Friday, December 24, 2010

The Revolution Initiated by CMS

Dreams are the wings on which reality soars. The global exposure that CMS provides to its students is the reality on which the dream of a united world lives. The 31 international events organised by the institution contribute to fostering a spirit of unity among them. They are made to realise that the competitions are not to widen the chasm between them and their counterparts from other countries, but to show them that the global exposure under the Broader Education Model for the 21st century that CMS strives to provide to its students ensures that they emerge as successful world leaders in day-to-day life, that they excel in whatever field they choose to embrace, and this is done by arming them with wisdom and knowledge pertinent to the contemporary ages. This way, students from CMS perform better in examinations and competitions than the national average. The competitive atmosphere in CMS adds to the values of the education imparted here.

But the story doesn't end here. The institution goes ahead in spearheading a revolution in peace education. For more than 50 years of its existence since 1959, CMS has been making consistent and concerted efforts to instill the values and importance of peace to its students. The values of tolerance and peace are highlighted by the World Peace Prayer and mock sessions of World Parliament organised at all major events. Such events serve as a platform where children can put forth their views. CMS aims to be the voice of the children of the world, it aims to lead the children to a world with peace and harmony. CMS envisages a united world that could be brought together only by a common international law.

The law of the land forms the real boundary between nations of the world. The existing physical boundaries typically demarcate different areas where different legislations are practiced. Nations can never be one as long as different sets of laws govern different nations. Unity could be possible only if there were a common law and order all over the world. This is where the judiciary could help.

The judiciary from different countries should come together to decide a common international law applicable and enforceable over all the nations of the world. this would help in maintenance of international peace and security.

Maintenance of international peace and security implies the prevalence of worldwide peace. This implies that peace should reign over all the nations of the world. peace is the greatest need of the hour, and it could be achieved only by living as a united whole.

To wage a war against war, children must be taught that the greatest sin before the world is a disruption in the recognition of things as a universal entity. a revolution needs to be initiated, and it would be a bit different from the kind witnessed in political circles. It would be a social revolution more potent and powerful than the Russian Revolution.

Open Source CMS Solutions

Open Source Content Management System is the type of site you shall use and that's why you have more control over the changes and updates, add quickly features (at low development costs) and also have an interactive and accessible website. Open Source CMS solutions also have a pretty large community behind and that's always a good indicator for reliability.


A big part of business owners finally choose closed source administration systems but, even if nothing is wrong with this approach, you might be able to get even more worth with a open source solution (and with the community's support also). These days there are a lot of open source CMS solutions around and here are a few of them:
Joomla!: Has been designated in 2009 the most popular open source content management system on the web and that's because it features lots of plug-ins, widgets and even templates.Wordpress: Also does not need any introduction. Millions of sites on the web make use of it's services. Has surpassed others and has become the most popular CMS in use today.Drupal: Is also a popular and powerful content management system. It allows easy management, organization and content publishing on a website and has been growing since its release back in 2001.SMF: Even if it's not as renowned as vBulletin or PhpBB, it still is one of the most secure forum software available. As a serious online business also needs a forum for support and not only, it's a good solution since it implements easily and it's SEO friendly.

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Content Management Systems (CMS) Platform

C M Mess

Content Management Systems (CMS) have been around for quite sometime. I observed various issues with the earlier Web CMS's from both a technological perspective and a user point of view. Circa 2005 I worked for a small, local web design company when the first breed of CMS's were becoming popular. The premise was that if we could allow our clients to update their own websites then this would provide relief to our customer support team to provide assistant in other "more pressing" areas.

The problem was that although we were able to assign a member of the client's team to be the responsible owner of the content and provide the necessary training to utilise the plethora of features of the CMS, we failed to realise that the responsible owner was neither an expert in writing effective web copy or a marketing expert. Afterall, we were working with predominantly small businesses who are used to assigning their teams to multiple tasks. Therefore, multitasking and being generalists were traits of the majority of their team members.

Validon't

From a technological perspective, the CMS's were throwing up all sorts of anomalies which our development team and the original 3rd party vendor of the CMS were tackling on an adhoc basis. We also had limited resources and our main problems were Web Browser compatibility and the fact that the CMS that we were using would invalidate any clean code that we had managed to pass through a W3C Validator.

That is in the past though and many modern day Content Management System's can provide clean, valid code and that is fantastic but many of the issues that I have raised and a few that I haven't raised still crop up. Clients still require CMS training but many of the clients I speak to have already had at least some experience of using a CMS. This does help to decrease the learning curve. But what about the lack of web writing expertise? Well, this is still an issue but, thankfully, there are many solutions.

Riding the Gravy Train

Internet Marketing firms such as ourselves now run courses and seminars which tackle issues such as writing effective web content. Half a day's training won't give you the skills and experience of a bona-fide web journalist but it should provide a sound basis to become a competent content writer. Long term this should provide a better return on investment for the business. Though outside the scope of this article, it would be interesting to compare the correlation between staff who are sent on training courses to update their company's blog and those who are sent on the courses to update the actual website.

Content Management System and SEO

Running a search engine optimization campaign requires appropriate content. Content management systems (CMS) have been introduced in the market to take care of the labour put in creating a unique content every time. CMS is a software that provides website authoring and administration tools. These tools are specially designed for users with less knowledge of web programming languages or markup languages. CMS lets you create and manage the site content with ease.


But are they really effective at doing what they are created for, lets find out -


There are a few problems that Search Engine Optimization professionals at SEO firms have encountered while using CMS systems. These systems can take the campaign for a toss as many of the CMS systems were not designed as per the search engine marketing requirement.


Meta Tags -


Meta tags contain the information of the page. They are scanned by the search engine spider to evaluate the content of the page. However important this feature may be, many CMS systems do not allow the addition of relevant TITLE and DESCRIPTION Meta Tags to the content. This drawback of the CMS system can damage the SEO campaign seriously.


Dynamic URLs -


Search engines index a limited amount of dynamic pages. These dynamic pages are determined by the page URLs containing special characters like %or & or =. The search engine spider finds it difficult to handle dynamic URLs strings.


Hence a URL like http:// sample.com/page.asdc?iv=143&session=234234wrwresf¶m=xzfdch will not get enough results, but the URL http:// sample.com/products.asdc can do a much better job.


The problem of indexibility and session ID are very common with the CMS system.


No Keywords in the URL -


CMS systems mostly do not let you create a URL with the keywords included. A keyword rich URL is highly important from the SEO point of view. It gets better page rankings.


Most of the CMS users are not aware of the SEO requirements while creating the content and SEO professionals require training to operate the CMS system. To help the content authors you can download the readily available online and desktop tools that will help to analyze content and report on how it is likely to perform in search engines. However, the use of SEO tools is time consuming and users need to keep switching between tools to create content and analyse it.


Approaching a Search Engine Optimization firm is a good idea to SEO the business as they take care of all the technical problems encountered using CMS. The SEO firm will gain complete understanding of the technical makeup of your site before launching the SEO campaign.


RyzeUp is a boutique Search Engine Marketing Agency that delivers high quality outsourced SEO, PPC, SMO, E-mail Marketing, Affiliate Program Management and Link Building Services to Digital Media and Internet Marketing firms worldwide.