Drupal Development
No prizes for guessing, what’s the flavour of the season in corporate India. It is of course, offshore outsourcing. And with Drupal (Content Management System) spawning significant demand in the foreign shores, the Indian programmers are all-set to tackle the growing requirements and obviously the developers at Rightway Solution with strong domain knowledge. For the newbie’s on the block, Drupal is a free and open source modular framework and content management system which is used in the programming language PHP.
Though many Content Management Systems are available, the developers have taken a liking for Drupal, as its built-in functionality with add on modules, facilitates host of activities like,
• Arranging the content,
• Modifying its appearance,
• Computerizing of the administrative tasks,
• Managing site guests and contributors.
• Forums
• Peer to Peer networking
• Newsletters
• Podcasting
• Picture galleries
• File uploading and downloading
Being a sophisticated programming interface; most of the tasks can be achieved with small or no programming. In fact, scores of people and organizations have been using Drupal to power or say, support their web sites, including,
• Community web portals
• Discussion sites
• Corporate web sites
• Intranet applications
• Personal web sites or blogs
• Aficionado sites
• E-commerce applications
• Resource directories
• Social Networking sites
It has been reported that from May 2006 to April 2007; Drupal was downloaded from the website more than 6, 00,000 times. A valid proof on the software’s growing popularity. Besides, Drupal software is free to download and use. So if your find that Drupal has all those critical characteristics that will go a long way in enhancing your website, then what are you waiting for. Join hands with Rightway Solutions. The company is equipped thoroughly for the task at hand, so to expand and refine Drupal as per client requirements.
The Advantages Hosting Resellers Acquire by Switching to Windows
Many linux hosting resellers might find advantages of changing to a hosting service that sells Windows server hosting over Linux. While Linux is a very popular web hosting solution, Windows offers many advantages that would benefit a number of customers. For this reason, it can be a very good hosting solution for webmasters to resell.
For example, With Windows Reseller Hosting providers you don’t have to hold multiple accounts in order to maintaine all the customers that you might have, those that are normally devided out over the various control panels that you have in Linux Hosting. This can make keeping track of customers so much easier and save you a lot of time. You can still web sites written in any of the languages out there. This means you can run a PHP and MySQL based site along side of your ASP.Net SQL site as well. It is all on the same server and in the same control panel so you don’t need to keep switching back and forth.
You can also use ASP.Net and ASP, a advanced tool in the developing applications for the web. That is certainly not the case when you use UNIX. With the Windows hosting platform that lets you use ASP.Net and ASP, you can use those more popular content management systems and they will run well. The ASP scripting works much better with a Windows hosting platform.
When you use Windows Reseller Hosting, you will always have the latest technology available that you can add to your portfolio of services. You will be able to offer Exchange 2007, and there is also Windows Mobile and the ActiveSync that goes with that. There is also the Push Technology and the SharePoint 2007 that is also available. All of these additional services you can offer with your hosting platform and it makes for additional income and a more powerful way to market your professional services.
The SQL Server provided by Microsoft is a data management and analysis software that has worked so well and has been rather reliable for a great many complex business applications. It is one of the fasted growing database solutions that is being used, and it can give a competitive advantage when you offer this with your Windows hosting as a reseller.
Compared to the UNIX control panel, the control panel of a Windows reseller hosting program has a clustered solution that makes use of the Active Directory technology also provided by Microsoft. This means it already has Enterprise level solutions right from the start. You show that you can meet growing demands, as you need them right away.
With all of these reasons to use a windows reseller hosting platform, it gives solutions to what you can offer to customers when you sell them this solution to their hosting needs. When you partner up with a reseller that offers this platform, you’re offering many opportunities to grow and help your clients to expand their needs and utilize the latest technology. Once you try a windows reseller program, you will find a higher quality of customer and be able to offer long term, lasting professional hosting services.
How to choose a content management system
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Content management systems for managing web sites don’t necessarily inspire the creative mind, but for many sites, they are the difference between a smooth ride and headache. Whether you’re thinking of buying an off-the-shelf package or designing one in-house, there are a few things to consider before you make your decisions. This article aims to explain the benefits of running a Content Management System and what you need to think about if you are considering using one.
Hand-crafting a big site is a thing of the past. It takes too long and there are so many ways in which it can go wrong. Time to buy a Content Management System? Probably, but wait! The software is only part of the job. You are going to have to think carefully about your needs, understand a bit more about what a CMS do, do some preparation before you start your project and change the way you think about HTML and graphical pages.
1. Understand the quantity and complexity of your content:
This is arguably the most important step in the process. How many things and how many types of things are you trying to manage? How much will it change and how often? Who are the content contributors? A thousand things of the same type is obviously easier to manage than a thousand things of ten different types. As you’re assessing your content, don’t forget to include multiple languages or localities – 100 things in 10 languages is actually 1000 things you have to collect, manage and publish.
2. Think about components inside your content:
If you work with the web, the concept of a page feels natural but there is more we can do if we think about the sub-components that make up a page such as individual news stories, adverts, products or calendar events. Some CMS manipulate pages but it can be more powerful to use a CMS that builds pages from these sorts of components perhaps letting the same information appear in different parts of the site or in different formats.
What sorts of components will your site contain? Press releases, tutorials, classified ads, messages, recipes, share prices, contact addresses? Well planned and organised content components will support your business as the business changes.
3. Design the database carefully:
Most CMS use a relational database such as Microsoft SQL Server or MySQL. Others will achieve the same effect using XML.
In a relational database, each component will be stored in a table with rows and columns – think of it like an Excel spreadsheet. Each
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The benefits of a content management system (CMS) – Part 2
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A typical content management system, or CMS for short, has two main benefits that make this piece of software one of the must-have tools for the modern day web site owner.
The first main benefit of a CMS is that it allows fast, real time updates of a web site without ever having to touch HTML coding or upload each individual page after editing the content through the raw HTML file. As anyone who has ever spent days hand coding and amending content on 200 page web sites will tell you, using a CMS to update content not only saves you time that is better spent creating your content and focusing on your business, it also saves you money that traditionally would have been spent on hiring a programmer to edit the content and re-upload the pages to your site.
Many modern CMS solutions use graphical interfaces and editing functions similar to those found in desktop applications such as Microsoft Word, meaning that there is less of a learning curve with the application as most PC users will be familiar with the format already. This again cuts down on the time needed to learn the functions of the CMS and means one can hit the ground running when publishing new content.
The second main benefit of a CMS is that with a little training, anyone with even limited technical computer skills can update an entire site’s content themselves. This gives non-technical folk (i.e. non-programmers) the tools to keep their site updated without incurring development costs each time an amendment is made to the site.
Other benefits of using a CMS include the ability to change your web site design just by uploading one template design that is automatically applied to each page across the site, with many CMSs offer the ability to choose different layouts for each page, if needed. This again saves a lot of time and effort and also cuts down on the chance of errors being made on a page to page basis. Additionally, most modern content management systems are coded to adhere to the latest coding standards and best practices, with the more forward thinking CMS providers designing and building the system to comply with accessibility standards to make sure everyone can access and use both the site and content management system.
Although choosing a CMS from the many out there can seem daunting, especially if you haven’t had experience of using a CMS before and are therefore unaware of what is ‘good’, ‘bad’ or just plain ugly, it is always best to use one that the person responsible for updating the web site feels comfortable using.
Each CMS on the web requires varying degrees of technical ability to install and operate, but the one that consistently makes the grade for me and my clients in terms of ease of use, ease of installation and the features it contains, is CMS Made Simple, an Open Source CMS packed with simple to install and use add-ons. It contains options to include search engine friendly URLs (which does require a little technical skill to implement), shopping carts and product catalogues for e-commerce sites, blogging utilities and even an email marketing module, all of which are simple to use and all for free and contained in a fully customisable package.
My advice if you don’t already have a CMS to update your site and you are currently spending precious hours and money on manually updating the site is to get one ASAP.
It will be one of the best investments you ever make.
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Joomla! CMS For Cutting Edge Content Management
Joomla is an award-winning Content Management System (CMS) that will help you build websites and other powerful online applications. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everybody
Joomla in Action:
Joomla is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Joomla is easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable.
Joomla! Features:
1) Completely database driven site engines
2) News, products or services sections fully editable and manageable
3) Topics sections can be added to by contributing authors
4) Fully customisable layouts including left, center and right menu boxes
5) Browser upload of images to your own library for use anywhere in the site
6) Dynamic Forum/Poll/Voting booth for on-the-spot results
7) Runs on Linux, FreeBSD, MacOSX server, Solaris and AIX
Extensive Administration:
Change order of objects including news, FAQs, articles etc.
Random Newsflash generator
Remote author submission module for News, Articles, FAQs and Links
Object hierarchy – as many sections, departments, divisions and pages as you want
Image library – store all your PNGs, PDFs, DOCs, XLSs, GIFs and JPEGs online for easy use
Automatic Path-Finder. Place a picture and let Joomla! fix the link
News feed manager. Choose from over 360 news feeds from around the world
Archive manager. Put your old articles into cold storage rather than throw them out
Email-a-friend and Print-format for every story and article
In-line Text editor similar to Word Pad
User editable look and feel
Polls/Surveys – Now put a different one on each page
Custom Page Modules. Download custom page modules to spice up your site
Template Manager. Download templates and implement them in seconds
Layout preview. See how it looks before going live
Banner manager. Make money out of your site
Is a Joomla! CMS web site difficult to maintain:?
Once Joomla! is installed and running, it is simple for even non-technical users to add or edit content, update images, and to manage the critical data that makes your company or organization go. Anybody with basic word processing skills can easily learn to manage a Joomla site. Via a simple, browser-based interface you will be able to easily add new press releases or news items, manage staff pages, job listings, product images, and create an unlimited amount of sections or content pages on your site.
Where do you see Joomla in the future?
I see Joomla as an extremely robust and attractive CMS for businesses and people who just want to run a website. If we can get the documentation issues sorted out, Mambo will be a market leading CMS, and I have no doubt about that
The Versatility Of Drupal Cms
You determined your target market and developed an online business around it. After much deliberation, you chose a memorable domain name and registered it. You found a reliable, affordable Drupal hosting company and now youre ready to set up your website.
Websites consist of content pages. Those content pages must be organized so everything is accessible as you add to the site over time. One of the most popular content management systems is Drupal.
The basic unit of content in Drupal is called a node. Just about all the information in this CMS is stored as a node. Content is not sorted into various groups. Instead if using hard coding, each node has a title, author, publication date and published flag.
To create certain kids of pages or define specified site areas, you pull up content with certain properties and list it. In Drupal, the default front page has a blog format and lists the latest stories posted. Pieces with a sticky flag are moved up to the top of the list. Otherwise, the list is sorted by the date the content was published.
Another way to organize your content in Drupal is using taxonomy. Keywords are used to define types of content, sections and different categories within your website. Lists of topics are formed with related content. Keywords help to organize the content.
Drupal content can be set up in a blog style. Listing pages can show blog entries by specific writers. The blog can be sitewide or only show posts by certain writers.
You can also organize your website content by using views. The top 10 most popular pages of content can be listed to create a special section. To determine listing placement, content can be filtered based on the date published, the number of comments, by writer and by keywords.
The versatility of the Drupal CMS gives you the ability to plan a structured website that you can constantly add. Drupal allows you to build a powerful, complex website that easily grows with your changing business needs. With reliable web hosting and catchy domain name, youre on the way to online success!
Competing and Winning Against the Goliaths: Strategies for Smbs to Level the Playing Field in Content Management
It’s an interesting period for Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs). While emergence of Internet as a premier medium of collaboration and commerce has presented small and medium businesses an unparalleled opportunity to compete on an even keel with their large counterparts – the same medium has also brought forward a host of new challenges. An explosion of content, and arrival of new Internet-based social computing technologies and concepts such as Wikis, blogs, RSS feeds and Web 2.0, has left SMBs scrambling and struggling to ensure an interactive customer experience.
The Website is the face of the SMB, and one of the most visible and influential customer touch points – especially when the SMB is trying to reach global customers who are not aware of its brand. A Website with inappropriately tagged content or a few missing links can turn away a prospective customer into the hands of the competition in a matter of few seconds.
To address this, many SMBs have considered traditional installed content management systems, only to realize later that these applications are far more expensive to implement and maintain than they are worth. This problem is compounded by the fact that most SMBs have skeletal IT staff and, at best, limited IT budgets. Even Open Source CMS options suffer from these same limitations because while the software code may be “free†everything else comes with a price tag. Much like installed software there are substantial costs with implementing it to your requirements, managing, upgrading and maintaining the software and hardware, support, and all the things that go along with the lifecycle of your site like template changes, site redesigns, workflow tweaks and navigation updates.
As a result, the CIO can seldom justify the high cost and long implementation time required to install a content management system. Additionally, as content management involves a host of tasks including usability, design, and information architecture – SMBs face an uphill task in ensuring that the Website reflects the dynamic needs of the business.
Using SaaS to level the playing field
To compete effectively, SMB’s need content management solutions that are easily configurable, are economical to purchase and maintain, and quick to implement. This is difficult to achieve in a traditional CMS, which are expensive to procure, complex to implement and configure, and even more difficult to maintain.
It is in answer to these problems, that specialist players like CrownPeak have emerged and grown rapidly. CrownPeak is one of the leading torchbearers of the ‘Software as a Service’ SaaS model, and has turned the disadvantages of the traditional model to its advantage. By letting customers access ‘software’ as a service, CrownPeak ensures that organizations are spared the high cost of purchasing software. Moreover, as the software is hosted, there is no hardware to buy and no software to purchase and install and you get the same CMS functionality as you do with traditional installed vendors or open source solutions. As a customer, you just pay on a fixed monthly or quarterly basis and leave the task of managing, maintaining and upgrading the software to the vendor. You don’t pay till an application is fully running and completely configured to your environment. Try telling this to a traditional CMS vendor!
Organizations also save cost as they do not have to employ IT, system integrator, developer or Web agency resources to tweak the HTML, workflow, or to take care of hosting. The real work in a CMS implementation begins after the site goes live which is when most vendors leave you the keys to the CMS and say good luck. But players such as CrownPeak provide a dedicated account manager for the lifetime of the service, who is the same person who actually implements the CMS for your site, as part of your monthly cost. This is an extremely attractive value proposition when compared to the traditional software model, where costs are paid upfront and the risk of product implementation and adoption is totally on the customer. With SaaS, SMBs can compete with the big players on an even footing, as they can have access to the best software, the best support, and at the best price. For instance, a player like CrownPeak offers service that covers the entire spectrum of the content management lifecycle at a monthly subscription cost. This includes licenses, hardware, hosting, bandwidth, management and support.
Improved usability and accountability
To understand how a small or medium organization can benefit from using a SaaS model, let’s take the example of School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA), a non-profit dedicated to educating artists and fostering their creative abilities. As a non-profit organization, the school had limited IT staff due to budget constraints, which in turn made the task of keeping the online content up-to-date an extremely challenging task.
By subscribing to CrownPeak’s SaaS model, the School has been able to enable even non-technical users to contribute and update content on the site. Through the ability to quickly and easily update new content, the Boston based school has expanded its web presence by including art galleries, calendars and other relevant information. The benefits are obvious – improved web presence leading to increased web traffic at an economical cost. The site won the American Business Award for Best Design and Best Software Development in 2005. As this example shows, organizations can easily accelerate their speed of publishing content by giving subject matter experts tools that are simple to use. Maintaining a uniform look and feel across the site is also far simpler leaving content specialists to focus more on their core competency of content creation rather than worrying about formatting changes.
With features that provide a higher ROI than traditional systems, it is not surprising that SaaS players like CrownPeak have rapidly found acceptance in the marketplace. Features like complete system auditing and reporting provides even mid sized enterprises an ability to manage and track the history of all work, easing adherence to compliance of regulations. Files can be tracked through a complete document lifecycle, including check-in, check-out, versioning, rollback, approvals, and scheduling.
Small and medium enterprises will also appreciate the ease with which they can simply browse their Website and click ‘Edit’ on the tool bar. Completely configurable workflows enable organizations to assign tasks to any person, and escalate in case defined thresholds are crossed. For example, e-mail alerts can be sent to content owners of specific sections on a Website, when these sections don’t get updated after a specific time period. This is difficult to do in a manual system. With the SaaS vendor taking full responsibility of configuring and integrating back end systems, SMBs also do not have to worry about integration hurdles.
Using Web 2.0 to your advantage
With Web 2.0 radically changing user experience and preference, it is imperative for SMBs to adapt and give the same level of service that their large counterparts provide. They can look at vendors like CrownPeak to create multiple presentation of content fed from a single source. With a single centralized interface, customers can manage their different digital assets in a far more effective and efficient manner. As an example, content in a corporate blogs can be controlled and managed by employing workflow and approval rules. Similarly, RSS feeds can be created easily and automatically by simply publishing a piece of content on an RSS feed. What’s more, visitors to a company’s site can personalize their RSS feeds by defining a keyword or phrase. When new content related to the keyword or phrase appears on the Website, personalized content is automatically pushed.
The widespread adoption of CMS delivered as a SaaS points to a healthy trend that has been proven to improve the competitiveness of small and medium businesses. Through the ability to scale flexibly without the hassles of integration and maintenance, the SaaS model offers SMBs the power to fully leverage the power of the Internet and compete on an equal footing with their more established larger counterparts. Similar to the outsourcing wave which analysts now say is an irreversible trend; SaaS too is an irreversible trend that has the potential to catapult the proverbial David into the league of the Goliaths.
5 Advantages To Use CSS Templates Over Content Management System
As technology advances, more and more Content Management Systems (CMS) were being developed to help Webmasters to create websites. Some of the more popular CMS include Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal. However, not all CMS were developed for the users in the first place, some are too difficult to use and some just could not get the buy in from the customers. This article discusses some of the advantages that a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) has over conventional CMS.
The first advantage for using a CSS template is fast performance. Most CMS has terrible loading speed as they have a great deal of functions and reference to create for every action from the users. Using CSS for website creation will reduce most of the unnecessary loading time for a web page. A pure CSS template can be loaded at least twice the time faster than a traditional full-fledged CMS.
If you have used a CMS before and has tried to alter the template of the CMS, you will know that it is not a simple task especially if you are using that CMS for the first time. All CMS has their own standard and guidelines to design the templates and hence, you will have to follow and pick up their guidelines if you want to improve the template. However, if you are using CSS template, you can simply change any element in the style sheets and it will reflect across the site straight away. CSS templates allow a greater flexibility when it comes to customization of design elements on a web page.
The third advantage boils down to templates availability. Most CMS do not offer a wide range of templates for the users. They leave it to the users or open source community to contribute. Hence, you will seldom find a nice template for your site unless you are using popular CMS like Wordpress or Joomla. On the other hand, CSS templates are widely available and most are free as well. You do not have to pay for most CSS templates on the Internet.
The fourth advantage for using CSS templates is that you do not need to continue to update patches or download fresh versions. All CMS are ‘live’ and they continue to update their application security so it is important for CMS users to maintain and update the version regularly. For CSS template, you only have to download once and use it for life (if you intend to stay with the design).
The last reason to use CSS template is that you can optimize your site for search engines effortlessly as compared to CMS. Most CMS do not have the flexibility to change the URL structure and other search engine critical elements on a web page. Using a CSS template will allow you to have 100% freedom to control every element of your web page.
To conclude, CSS layouts is a good choice if you already possesses some web design knowledge and do not intend to have a lot of features in your site. However, if you are new to website creation and in need of many functions for your new site, then a CMS is recommended regardless of the above advantages.
Web Design Sydney, Web Development Australia – SHIFT Interactive
A content management system (CMS) Sydney is a system used to manage the content of a Web site. Content management systems are deployed primarily for interactive use by a potentially large number of contributors. Web content management systems are often used for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing industry-specific documentation such as news articles, operators’ manuals, technical manuals, sales guides, and marketing brochures.
The intent of web design is to create a web site — a collection of electronic files that reside on a web server/servers and present content and interactive features/interfaces to the end user in form of Web pages once requested. Such elements as text, bit-mapped images (GIFs, JPEGs, PNGs), forms can be placed on the page using HTML/XHTML/XML tags. Displaying more complex media (vector graphics, animations, videos, sounds) requires plug-ins such as Flash, QuickTime, Java run-time environment, etc. Plug-ins are also embedded into web page by using HTML/XHTML tags.
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, published a website in August 1991. Berners-Lee was the first to combine Internet communication (which had been carrying email and the Usenet for decades) with hypertext (which had also been around for decades, but limited to browsing information stored on a single computer, such as interactive CD-ROM design). Websites are written in a markup language called HTML, and early versions of HTML were very basic, only giving websites basic structure (headings and paragraphs), and the ability to link using hypertext. This was new and different to existing forms of communication – users could easily navigate to other pages by following hyperlinks from page to page.
Improvements in browsers’ compliance with W3C standards prompted a widespread acceptance and usage of XHTML/XML in conjunction with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to position and manipulate web page elements and objects. Latest standards and proposals aim at leading to browsers’ ability to deliver a wide variety of media and accessibility options to the client possibly without employing plug-ins.
Typically web pages are classified as static or dynamic.
Static pages don’t change content and layout with every request unless a human (web master/programmer) manually updates the page.
Dynamic pages adapt their content and/or appearance depending on end-user’s input/interaction or changes in the computing environment (user, time, database modifications, etc.) Content can be changed on the client side (end-user’s computer) by using client-side scripting languages (JavaScript, JScript, Actionscript, etc.) to alter DOM elements (DHTML). Dynamic content is often compiled on the server utilizing server-side scripting languages (Coldfusion, ASP, JSP, Perl, PHP, Python, etc.). Both approaches are usually used in complex applications.
How to become an expert in content management systems (CMS) – Part 1
Becoming an expert in the content management systems (CMS) is an excellent way to become more valuable to your organisation or to increase your desirability in the workforce in general.
Before you even start to answer the question of how to become a CMS expert, you must first understand what the purpose and definition of content management systems.
What is a Content Management System?
Perhaps most simply put, the CMS is a software solution that allows both technical and non-technical staff members to to create, edit, and control a wide array of electronic content. It is through the implementation of standard layouts, scripting languages, and corporate standards that the foundation for the content management system is laid.
Administration of the CMS
The CMS is structured in such a way to provide for varying levels of access associated with abilities to add, delete, edit and post information on the system.
The Technical Administrator (TA) will be provided complete access to all areas of the content management system. The TA will need to set up the company preferences in the ‘back-end’ of the product. This is where adjustments to scripting languages, settings, tools, and reporting capabilities are administered. In addition, the TA will need to set up user accounts for help desk analysts, desk-side support specialists, and the CMS specialist (end-user). The TA sets the layout and programs the requirements for information additions, deletions and publishing of the electronic information.
The help desk analysts will need to have a level of access that allows them to see a portion of the CMS back-end to help determine errors that are occurring for the CMS specialist.
The desk side support staff members will be provided a level of access that allows them to install the product on end-user desktops and may be provided the ability to set user account properties depending upon the policies in place at the company. These staff members need to be able to troubleshoot errors that the front-line CMS specialists may encounter. This group will need to be familiar with some of the more common user-errors and be able to provide some degree of training if the error resulted from human factors.
The CMS Administrator is provided with more advanced tools than the desk side and help desk analysts. This position is responsible for making larger revisions or additions, testing links and ultimately ensuring the content meets the formatting requirements of
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