Archive for the 'CMS' Category

The Pirate Bay launched Uncensored Blogging Service

Published
by
Riccardo
on April 17, 2008
in Blogging and CMS
. 0 Comments

The Provider of the famous BitTorrent-Tracker now also launched an new Blogging-Service. Those hosted Blogs will be left totally uncensored says The Pirate Bay.

BayWords is the new Blogging Service of Pirate-Bay-Owner and it’s free of charge. It’s not just a Blogging Service like others, it is there to give people to speak their mind freely without censoring it.  To this short, you can say ANYTHING you want! “As long as they won’t be anything against the swedish laws this block will be protected” the owner says!

BayWords is based on CMS Wordpress. It doesn’t have many functions installed yet tho as their emphasize is to provide a fast and reliable service. But new functions are about to follow, e.g. statistics and own domains. Like any other Service BayWords will be financed via Advertising.

Riccardo-Ulpts.com Re-Launch with Joomla 1.5

Published
by
Riccardo
on April 16, 2008
in CMS
. 0 Comments

Hey guys, it’s been ages since I updated my personal site, not to speak off my blog :-) Anyway I finally got myself a new laptop and did it. I re-did my personal Model site from the ground with Joomla 1.5!

A few reason why I decided to use Joomla this time:

  1. Great Flickr Plugin
  2. Loads of nice Designs available (I purchased mine at CMSLounge and adjusted graphics myself)
  3. Nice Interface & easier Administration compared to Drupal (Useful for smaller websites like this one)

Joomla 1.5.2 works a lot better than 1.5.1 which I tried beforehand but didn’t decide to use. By using a internal FTP client you don’t need to worry about setting folder permissions which was always an issue.

Check my new site: Riccardo-Ulpts.com !

Drupal 5.3 Upgrade available

Published
by
Riccardo
on October 29, 2007
in CMS, Drupal and OpenSource
. 0 Comments

Drupal 5.3 is now available for download. These are maintenance releases that fix problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as some security vulnerabilities.

You can download the latest Release on Drupal.com, click here!

The full list of changes can be found by reading the 5.3 release notes.  For a complete list of all bug fixes in the stable DRUPAL-5 click here.

A very nice tutorial how to upgrade from Drupal 5.2 to the latest 5.3 Release you can find on Ausweb.com.au .

Top SEO Modules for Drupal and Wordpress

Published
by
Riccardo
on September 24, 2007
in Blogging, CMS, Drupal, Module, OpenSource, SEO and Wordpress
. 0 Comments

Drupal and Wordpress are very popular and powerful content management systems. Although Wordpress itself is considered more a blog system rather than a cms. Joomla is also a very popular content management system, I never tested it myself as I decided to use Drupal only. I’ve read many forums and reports about both Drupal and Joomla.

Check my Article: Drupal vs. Joomla (Creating websites…)

All of the above mentioned cms are written in PHP and support MySQL. They can be extended with hundreds of free add-ons (modules, components, plugins).

Below you will find modules made to optimize your website for search engines including tools for search engine friendly URLs, meta tag generation, social bookmarking services, performance tuning, user tracking and statistical analysis.

Important: You need mod_rewrite to be enabled on your Apache web server to make search engine friendly URLs work.

Secondly but more importantly is the content. No matter how many tools you have installed on your website, they will not bring you any SEO improvement if you don’t have any valuable content.

Drupal Modules

  1. Block Cache creates cached versions of each block displayed on your website. For each cached block only one SQL query is executed thus reducing server load resulting in better performance and faster delivery of content.
  2. Google Analytics
    Adds the Google Analytics web statistics tracking system to your website. Provides the ability to selectively track certain user roles. Now with support for segmentation - allowing tracking of logged in visitors by user id, username, and profile fields from within Google Analytics.
  3. Node (key)Words/Meta-tags
    Allows users to add meta tags, e.g. keywords or description. Nodewords renamed meta tags, adds meta tag and meta keyword description which in many way has lost relevancy with most search engines but can still provide a useful description for the page and help reinforce content.
  4. Pathauto automatically generates path aliases based on the modules settings. A very powerful module that lets you define different URL patterns based on content types. In the latest version also allows to filter common words. Requires the core path module.
  5. RobotsTxt is useful if you run multiple Drupal sites from a single code base and want to have different robots.txt files for each of them.
  6. Related links
    Displays links related to content. The relatedlinks module enables nodes to display related URLs to the user via
    blocks. Related links can be defined in 3 ways:* Parsed links: links that are retrieved from the body of a node.
    * Manual links: links that are added manually.
    * Discovered links: links that are discovered by the module using various
    criteria, including the category terms of a node and suggestions provided by
    the search module (when enabled).The relatedlinks module allows for flexibility in creating blocks for each type
    of relatedlinks or creating blocks for a combination of link types.
    Read more!
  7. Search 404
    Instead of showing a standard “404 Page not found”, this module performs a search on the keywords in the URL, e.g. if a user goes to http://example.com/does/not/exist, this module will do a search for “does not exist”.It includes beta stage search engine keywords detections.
  8. Service links automatically adds links to social bookmarking and blog search services to your content. You can select which services you want to link to, restrict the display based on content (node) types and whether to display links in teaser and/or full page view.
  9. XML Sitemap generates an XML sitemap which complies with the sitemaps.org specification. The relative priority of each piece of content is calculated based on content type, number of comments, and promotion to front page. The values of each of these factors can be set in the admin section of the module.

Wordpress Plugins

  1. Add to Any adds links to a large number of social bookmarking sites to your posts.
  2. GeneralStats is a statistics components that counts the number of users, categories, posts, comments, pages, words in posts, words in comments and words in pages. Useful for doing keyword research.
  3. Google Sitemap Generator creates an XML sitemap of your website. In the current version homepage, posts, static pages, categories and archives are supported. Priority is automatically assigned based on the number of comments.
  4. Gregarious is a social bookmarking plugin for Digg, Reddit and Feedburner with update checks via AJAX.
  5. Popularity Contest is a counter for posts, categories, archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. to determine the most popular pages of your site.
  6. Technorati Tagging Plugin adds Techorati tags to your posts and enables you to display a tag cloud.
  7. WP-Cache is a page caching system to improve your websites performance. Cached pages are stored as static files, reducing server load thus making your site faster and more responsive.
  8. X-Valid attempts to convert posts and comments to valid XHTML. Read more on the benefits of Web Standards Compliance.

Feel free to comment and if you know any other SEO Modules I forgot to mention, please post a comment.

Drupal vs. Joomla (Creating websites…)

Published
by
Riccardo
on September 23, 2007
in CMS and Drupal
. 1 Comment

Hey guys sorry for my abstinence. I’ve been busy, well kind of. It’s quiet about modelling at the moment in China, as we are getting closer to the holiday season.

Most of the time I spent maintaining, designing and coding websites. As my girlfriend is finishing her studies in Homeopathy and Naturopathy at the Australasian College in Sydney I suggested her to have her own website to help grow and promote her future business online. She decide to register www.jbsoulscan.com and I would be helping her creating the website. I researched a lot to find out the best way to create a website. Also it had to be as easy as possible for the end user (with no background in coding and php) to create, change and delete content. Wordpress would have been easy to set up and use, but it is not a real CMS although it has some elements where you can work around and create websites as well. In the end, it is mainly a blogging Tool. I will compare Drupal and Wordpress at a later point. In the end Drupal and Joomla had a lot more to offer, including some blog functions as well. I needed a system which is powerful to create websites with a lot more than just blogging. It also had to be easy to administrate for the end user, in that case my girlfriend.

I did a lot research comparing any CMS out there. Easiest way to do so is google :)

I narrowed down to the 2 most popular CMS including Joomla and Drupal. Joomla seemed to be the more popular CMS software. It also had a bigger community and hundreds more high quality themes. I read a lot of articles, lets summarize the key points helping me to decide which CMS to choose.

I decided to use Drupal as a CMS (Content Managing System). I’ve never used it before. In fact I never used a real CMS before. I have to say that I’m not a professional coder, I do have experience modifying php code and html as well, but I’m more into administrating things.

Drupal not having that many modules and themes, I’m willing to accept some design inflexibility for the more feature flexible CMS. Joomla has hundreds of add-on modules as it is more commercial oriented. Drupal being more community oriented instead has fewer commerce related add ons than Joomla but still both have good shopping cards and image gallery systems.

Joomla because it makes a large number of server calls is slow in loading the pages and it isn’t particularly search engine friendly which was another reason for me to decide against Joomla.

Drupal is know for it’s performance and flexibility. The code is clean. Sites load quickly and Drupal is one of the most SEO (search engine optimization) friendly of current CMS’s.

Here are a few interesting articles to read about Joomla and Drupal.

I hope this might help some of you deciding…