Pre-Installation

Before the installation the software examines the user’s current software and hardware configuration and presents a list of possibly problematic issues that may need to be resolved. The RED items on the list are problematic, and will need to be corrected before beginning the installation. An example of a problematic issue would be using a shared host instead of a VPS. To resolve outstanding issues, you may need to contact your hosting provider.

Installation

When beginning the installation, you’ll need to enter a few details. Don’t worry, as each field is thoroughly explained. After you’ve entered your information, you’ll have the option of adding FTP configuration, letting Joomla correct any permission issues automatically. You can also choose to bypass this option and fill in the information manually later. Next, you’ll enter your site name and a few basic details, and then decide whether or not you’d like to install sample data. If you decide not to install sample data, then your website will be completely blank, so it is best to use sample data if you are not very experienced with web design. Installing sample data will let you experiment with a fully populated website. Once you have made this final decision, the installation will be completed momentarily.

Functionality and Appearance

If you chose to install sample data, you’ll notice that the default them provided by Joomla is very visually appealing. The administrative interface is also substantially improved, and is very user-friendly, employing a variety of dropdown menus. Although the software is very easy to use, the amount of features can be a bit overwhelming initially. For this reason, novice users may find it easy to lose content in arbitrary places, or become disassociated with certain areas of the CMS in some instances. Once you’ve gotten used to the plethora of functions, you’ll discover the true functionality of this award winning CMS.

Perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of the CMS is a becoming familiar with the vast array of sections and content categories. Figuring out where the article will be published may be slightly difficult initially, but as you become familiar with the process, you’ll notice the design of the software actually maximizes efficiency quite well. One feature you’ll find particularly useful is the new universal installer, which lets you install a zip file form a single central box, rather than having to choose an install type. Previous versions of Joomla required you to select whether the install was a theme, component, module or mambot, so this new feature definitely improves upon the software’s simplicity.

Conclusion

Ultimately, this content management system is definitely a capable solution for any VPS user. On thing you are sure to like about the software is the fact that there is readily available Joomla themes and tutorials online, as there is a very large Joomla community. The vast amount of knowledge and material pertaining to Joomla on the web make it an excellent solution for novice and experienced users alike.

Unfortunately, many website owners simply don’t have the money to outsource as much work as they’d like. Leaving them to handle a lot of the manual work involved with building and maintaining a website in solitude. Somewhere along the line, the immense amount of work it takes to create and maintain the project, deducts from the amount of creative fervor the website owner has.

Reducing Workload – Increasing Creativity

It’s a vicious cycle – the more you work, the less you’re able to conceptualize. As your creativity decreases, you have to work harder to maintain productivity, which ultimately is affected regardless of your efforts. The only way to stop this process is to reduce the workload you place on yourself, and as the old saying goes “Work smarter, not harder!”

Perhaps the easiest way to boost productivity, maximize creativity and improve the overall appearance and functionality of your website, is to use a capable content management system. Content management systems streamline the website creation and maintenance process by giving the user access to multiple user-oriented work modules. With a good content management system, users can automate content production and population, schedule tedious maintenance tasks, and even outsource work more efficiently than ever.

Outsourcing In Full

What is outsourcing? Outsourcing work is essentially defined as – delegating duties to employees. Sadly, most business owners who believe they are outsourcing work, are only partially doing so, as they still have to upload the work to the site once their employees send it in. While this doesn’t seem like much of a task, surely the individual that has to upload three hundred articles to various pages on his website would not agree. With a good content management system, you can outsource the uploading process to the very same employees that are responsible for producing the content, by assigning specific permissions to each employee. For example, one employee might be able to upload text, while another might only have permission to upload video content.

Focus on the Fun

It is common knowledge that those who engage in practices they enjoy, will ultimately be more successful at those practices. It can be very difficult to enjoy the production and progression of your website if you are constantly focusing on menial tasks. Using a solid CMS to outsource and boost productivity is a great way to restore the fun of building your business.

Saving Time By Granting Access

Even though you may have a team of writers, designers and programmers working with you full time on the project, uploading all of the content they provide can be a daunting task. In fact, you could spend hours of your own time just trying to incorporate the changes that you’re paying for. Instead of handling the situation manually yourself, why not let the employees upload the content to the site for you. You could easily save several hours a day by letting your employees upload their content personally. This would also give you a chance to work with the new improvements on a faster time scale. By the time you finish uploading all of the content provided, you’ll most likely have wasted half of the day, which could have otherwise been used to explore and organize all of the adjustments your employees could have made for you.

Deploying Your Employees

Once you have a team of reliable workers, you’ll need to know that they have access to certain areas of your site, in order to upload and incorporate their work into the design of your site. However, you do not want your employees to have access to all of the site, as this could present a security risk. Therefore, it is important that each employee be given privileges with which they can execute specific tasks with the permission of administrators only.  Using a good CMS will let you setup accounts for each employee and then set permissions for each account. For example, you can make it so your writers can only upload text to your site, or you can make it so the template designer can only add templates. These kind of restrictions will keep your employees from overstepping their boundaries.

Managing Workload With a CMS

Delegating duties to your employees is a very important part of keeping projects moving steadily. When an employee is confused about a certain issue, or the workload is not clearly stated, delays can result from poor communication. Administrators can communicate with their employees through an integrated messaging system. Each account is also given an email address at your domain, therefore each employee can also be contacted by external visitors of your site. This is especially useful for customer support employees. With the right CMS you can manage you entire staff with ease.

When people surf the web, they are looking for something, whether it be entertainment, information or a product/service. If you are able to give them what they want then your website will be successful, however your success will be short-lived if you cannot do this on a regular basis.  In order for your website to continue prospering, it must be updated daily. However, the process of updating a website manually is a tedious task, and ultimately it is very time consuming. This is where the use of a CMS (Content Management System) comes into play.

The Capabilities of Content Management Systems

A content management system is an online application, used to manage, collect and distribute vast amounts of relevant content automatically. A good CMS gives the user a platform in which they can effectively organize, archive, create, edit, publish, gather and spin content related to their niche. Content can be distributed and published evenly across a website on a scheduled basis ( which is perfect for a blog or news-related site). Content can also be gathered from other websites using RSS feeds, and then automatically “spun” using innovative extensions known as “content spinners.” Digital media such as videos, pictures and music can be gathered and embedded automatically,  simply by selecting a few preferences. In fact, with a good content management system and a few blogging plugins, your entire website can be populated with hundreds of interesting pages in just a few hours!

The Simplicity of Content Management Systems

Judging by the features you’ve just learned about, you’d think that learning how to use a CMS would be quite difficult. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Content management systems are designed specifically for novice users, and every function within the CMS is controlled via simple settings and preferences. Users have access to unlimited options, as a good CMS is expandable beyond limits. Tasks that would normally require advanced web design knowledge can now be completed in a mater of minutes by even the most novice users.

A good CMS will not only help you populate your site with content, but it will also populate it with visitors, by automatically posting your content to many leading social bookmarking sites simultaneously. You may be wondering how massive this software must be to accomplish all of this, yet the most amazing part is that no bulky software installs are required, as the software is hosted online and can be accessed from any computer, including some mobile devices.

Life Without Your CMS

I am sure you’re impressed by the CMS features you’ve just learned about, however these features are only a small fraction of what can be done with a good CMS. Now that you know what these programs are capable of, try imagining how long it would take you to do just one task I’ve mentioned. For example, how long would it take you to submit every article on your site to 50 bookmarking sites individually? If your site has only 50 articles, and you submitted each one to 50 bookmarking sites, you would be sitting there for at least an entire day working. Now imagine accomplishing the same task, in the time it took you to read this article!

Features

CMS Made Simple offers quite a few features.  SEO friendly URLs is at the top of the list and is a refreshing change from the standard CMS URLs that require a bit of fancy programming or modification to work with the major search engines.

There are a number of integrated features making this product an excellent choice – help, file manager with upload capabilities and an audit log.  User and group management are included as well as a group-based permission system.

CMS Made Simple allows for a unique web site design with the ability to change templates with ease.  The included admin panel is not only available in English but supports many other languages as well.  The program also boasts several extra features available with add-on modules – WYSIWYG, polls, blogging and calendar add-ons are just a few offered.

Support

The CMS Made Simple web site offers several avenues for support should the need arise.  Full documentation is available online as well as an FAQ, user forum, mailing list and an IRC chat channel.  If this isn’t enough, the company also offers a direct e-mail connection to a developer to have support issues handled when all other support routes fail to garner a user the answer they need.

The development side of this company’s web site allows users to report bugs and request features – a nice addition for regular uses of this CMS program.  This area also shows current releases and a roadmap to future developments of the software.

Beyond software

Going beyond simply producing and offering a CMS solution, CMS Made Simple also offers professional services for developers needing more assistance or something more than just what the program offers.  Among these services are support contracts purchased on a per-site basis, software development to help with solutions outside the standard program and the ability to contract one of the company’s developers for large projects.

Testimonials

As with any open source CMS program that may not be as popular as the biggies on the market, knowing that the product is stable and used by others is important.  The CMS Made Simple web site lists out many satisfied customers with complete testimonials regarding the product.  This web page shows the product is easy to use and is well-liked by many web professionals and business owners.

Final Thoughts

It definitely isn’t one of the more well-known open source content management systems out on the web but it is slowly growing in popularity.  CMS Made Simple is exactly that – an easy to use open source content management system.  This CMS program is worth checking out.

A CMS (content management system) is a specialize piece of software that allows you to efficiently maintain and update all the contents of your website.  Drupal is one of the very best at this, offering tremendous out of the box functionality along with support for a number of additional modules that can be used to extend its default capabilities.  Being an open-source software application, a community of users have contributed many components and modules for the overall betterment of the project.

Easy to Install and Set Up

Installing Drupal on your web hosting account is simple, especially when using an easy to use application installer such as Fantastico.  After installing the program, you can go through the process of designing your site and select from the array of content types that it will be compromised of.  A comprehensive wizard is available to walk you through the entire process and when setting things up, you are able to see a preview of what your site will look like when it is done.  This gives you the luxury to go back and make edits at any point during the design process.  Learning how to master the basic functions and options of Drupal is something that can literally be done in a matter of minutes.

The Benefits of Drupal Hosting

Due to its soaring popularity, Drupal has become a mainstay on the hosting market as several hosts now offer the software in their service plans at no additional cost.  Even though it has a reputation for being more complex than similar packages such as Joomla, all it takes is a basic level of technical skills to create a powerful and professional Drupal site.  In fact, if you can work with a simple word processing application and web browser, you can excel from the default functionality this dynamic CMS has to offer.  Drupal requires no programming knowledge of PHP or HTML to either create, maintain or update your website.

Conclusion

Drupal is a robust software package that offers the ability to create, manage and update various types of content.  It is primed for Web 2.0 applications so you can easily implement desirable features such blogs, forums and much more.  There are many CMS hosting solutions on the market and honestly, Drupal may not be suited for your needs.  For this reason, you should evaluate this product in and out to determine if it can meet your content management requirements.

Creating ASP.NET Applications

Webaptive works closely with the web server to add CMS functionality to your applications.  From within IIS, you can choose the application you want to enhance. Once you make your selection and a database is automatically created, you can then enable existing applications or develop new ones.  Because the method in which Webaptive associates itself with applications is specific to the ASP.NET framework, it is strongly recommend that you create your pages and applications using standard ASP.NET programming practices.

CMS Features

Though rich in ASP.NET functionality, Webaptive offers many of the same capabilities found in other CMS products.  For instance, it has a built-in WYSIWYG editor for easily creating articles and blog posts, a CSS editing facility, and support for multiple authors.  Some of its more advanced features include localization and campaign management as well content inheritance options for managers and administrators.  Another unique quality of Webaptive its seamless integration with Perifigure, Striquent’s sister product.  Perfigure is a powerful analytic tool that analyzes site performance and provides detailed statistics on traffic, marketing campaigns and several other business related activities.  These capabilities alone make Webaptive a very attractive CMS for business users.

Standing Alongside and Out from the Crowd

Marketed as a CMSaaS product, Webaptive shares a few qualities with similar hosted SaaS CMS solutions such as CushyCMS and Surreal CMS.  Many of these platforms work by mildly blending content management features into a web page or website.  Though effective for the most part, they are not all that intrusive in regard to the core technologies and as a result, only provide limited CMS functionality.  Although Webaptive performs in a similar manner, it goes beyond the basics by digging into the code at the ASP.NET application level.  This gives it the ability to interact with ASP.NET controls as well as the standard HTML elements.  When all components are properly configured, this CMS can truly help you take your web applications to the next level.  Another difference is that whereas most SaaS CMS platforms are hosted solutions, Webaptive can be downloaded, installed and configured on your own server.

Availability and System Requirements

The Webaptive CMS is currently available in three versions: Community, Express and Enterprise editions.  In terms of functionality, the Community and Express versions are nearly identical.  However, the community version is free and therefore does not come included with reliable technical support.  The Enterprise edition is the most powerful version of the product as it is equipped with many advanced back-end versions and of course, paid support.  In order to run Webaptive, you will need the Windows Server 2003 operating system or higher and an SQL Server database.  These elements are needed to support your ASP.NET applications and web pages.

Primary Features

When looking at the list of features, you can tell that Day put a lot of sweat into the most recent version of CQ5.   While many CMS vendors are steering clear of Web 2.0, fearing it will soon be eclipsed by the Semantic Web 3.0, Day is one company that puts a huge emphasis on it.  Some of its key features enable blog, forum and calendering functionality to help users incorporate that community like feel into their sites.  The application also comes included with a number of pre-installed widgets for site enhancement.  Web forms, comments, tags, slideshows, RSS feeds and wikis are just a few of the elements that can be used to encourage visitor interaction on you website.

Media Management Tools

CQ5 has a nicely integrated facility that makes it easy to maintain a variety of digital media assets.  Some of the most notable features allow you to manage audio and video, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF file formats, watermarking and format transcoding.  One of CQ5’s best qualities from a user aspect is image editing.  The platform allows full image rendering and has some pretty nice editing features.  Unlike many other content management tools, CQ5 offers a browser-based cropping functionality for getting the most out of your photos as you can easily crop, rotate, map and flush images.

Backup and Recovery

CQ5 truly excels in terms of its backup and recovery functionality.  The newest version offers a hot backup utility that allows you to create backups of your entire file system.  This includes content, configuration files, modules and web scripts.  Restoring a complete CQ5 instance is a simple as extracting the backup from the zip file and restarting the system.  This could be a great benefit that saves a company a lot time, money and valuable resources.  All it takes a single click and all data is sent to Quickstart bundled file for disaster recovery purposes, allowing you to backup and restore your business environment in minutes.

Conclusion

While the new and improved GUI brings some user-friendliness to the product, CQ5 is a CMS best suited for advanced users.  Developers can truly benefit from this tool as it packages together a powerful set of web technologies.  It is the sophisticated and robust environment that takes away from its usability and makes this tool a little much for beginners.

]]> http://webhostinggeeks.com/blog/2009/08/05/cq5-cms-review/feed/ 1 http://webhostinggeeks.com/blog/2009/07/02/digitalus-cms-review/ http://webhostinggeeks.com/blog/2009/07/02/digitalus-cms-review/#comments Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:42:01 +0000 CommunicateBetter http://webhostinggeeks.com/blog/?p=402 Released in August of 2008, the Digitialus content management system is a relatively new player in the open-source CMS market.  Version 1.5 recently hit the scene and sparked developers’ attention with features such as a web-based installer, globalization capabilities and the 960 Grid system page layout management tool.  Some of these features are incredibly easy to use while others call for you to be somewhat of a technical geek.  And even though Digitalus is still in the early stages of development, it has made some notable improvements by adding functionality found in some of the more well known systems.  Here is a rundown on the latest version of the Digitalus CMS.

The 960 Grid

One of the major highlights of the new Digitalus CMS is its integration with a CSS framework known as the 960 Grid System.  This system strives to streamline website development by providing dimensions based on the common width of 960 pixels.  The built-in Grid 960 Helper builds the CSS grid that allows this method to work, ultimately making it easier to create cross-browser friendly template layouts and cater to various users.

The helper is essentially a PHP class in the Zend Framework.  According to Digitalus Media president Forrest Lyman, the Grid 960 Helper is now referred to as a component and a part of the core library.  The component creates an XHTML layout grid and all the appropriate classes to incorporate with the Grid 960 CSS framework.  While this feature is incredibly useful, it is not mandatory as you can also build standard PHP scripts to use for your layouts.

User Management

Another major draw to Digitalus CMS is the user management, which should be quite simple to grasp for most people.  The software allows you to create two types of users: a Site Administrator and Super Administrator.  The former has granular control while the latter has access to everything.  If you check out the Digitalus Wiki, you will see that adding multiple users can be a rather “tedious task.”   The good thing is that the software lets you clone user permissions with a featured called Copy User Permissions.   For the most part, the user and permissions management tools are simplistic but could use a little more in terms of functionality and user-friendliness.

Conclusion

All in all, Digitalus is a nice content management tool that still has some maturing to do.  In an open-source CMS market saturated with products that all seem to do the same thing, the choice usually boils down to what best suits your needs as well the drawbacks you can deal with.  Because Digitalus is a newcomer and therfore is not yet proven like other systems, it may not be the solution for all applications.  If you need a CMS or publishing tool that offers basic capabilities, try taking a look at some blogging platforms such as WordPress or b2Evolution because they are a bit more functional, user-friendly and able to cover a greater range of needs.

Core Technologies

Umbraco is a content management solution that thrives off Microsoft web technologies, running on the Windows Server platform and SQL Server or VistaDB database system.  Built on the NET 2.0 framework, ASP.NET 2.0 and C#, it supports both NET User Controls and .NET Customer Controls without having to do much at all as they can easily be added using macros.  The CMS also provides you with full access to the Umbraco API, which has more than 15,000 lines of code.

Presentation

Unlike other open-source systems, Umbraco doesn’t have a template engine, yet a single template system, which can be viewed as both an advantage and disadvantage.  The good aspect is that you do not have to learn a brand new programming language in order to create your website.  With Umbraco, you can design your site with a popular tool such as Abode DreamWeaver or FrontPage, cut and paste the HTML code into the template editor and save.  When you render a page using the template system, the content can be automatically displayed in dynamic fashion.

The Umbraco CMS gives you complete control over your website design.  There is no need to scan the web for themes as the design can be anything you desire.

Umbraco Content

In the Umbraco environment, the core foundation of your site is the Document Type.  The Document Type refers to the type of content that can be incorporated into your website.  Prime examples include Articles, News Items, your HomePage and SearchPage.   Determining how Document types work is key to grasping the Umbraco application itself.  While this isn’t the easiest part to decipher, once you get a solid understanding of these concepts, the rest of system will become much easier to comprehend.

Administrative Functions

The Umbraco Back Office is where you can perform a variety of administrative tasks.  The number of tasks others can perform all depends on their roles and permissions.  Some of the management options you have are dealing with scripts, custom templates, media and document types, style sheets and programming languages.  There is also a section made for developers, allowing you to perform actions such as adjusting browser cache settings, manage data types, create macros, Python files and more.

Conclusion

The Umbraco CMS makes an ideal solution for the Microsoft .NET savvy developer.  It has become very popular over the last few years, now averaging approximately 7,000 downloads per month.  Though not an out-of-box, user-friendly content management tool like Joomla or Mambo, Umbraco’s power and straightforwardness makes it a winner.  If you’re looking for a .NET-driven system to create a content-rich, dynamic website, the Umbraco CMS is worth checking out.