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Drupal is one of the most popular CMS solutions on the market, along with Joomla and WordPress. All CMS give you the ability to choose templates for your website, and most of them have the same features in terms of design function, however Drupal seems to simplify the process of using themes with your website, even more than the average CMS.

The beauty of Drupal is that the design of your entire site can be controlled within one central database. Although the process is fairly simple, to fully take advantage of Drupal’s design features, there are a few things you should know.

Choosing Your Theme

Obviously the first thing you’ll want to do is select several themes that would fit your website. You can find themes in many places on the internet, such as third party websites. Simply do a web search for website design templates and themes, and you will find a huge selection to choose from.  While selecting the themes it is important to note whether or not the theme is supported by the version of Drupal you’re using. If you’re having trouble finding a theme that suits your needs, then you may want to hire a web designer to assist you in creating a custom made template.

You can find web designers that are willing to work for a relatively low price on many of the freelancing sites and forums online. Make sure you only work with reputable freelancers, as this presents the least amount of risk possible. You’ll also want to hire someone that is familiar with Drupal’s compatibility, and you’ll need to make sure they are wiling to make revisions if you are not satisfied with the template. Designing a website has to be a collaborative process that involves team work and trial and error. Make sure you theme matches the goals of your website as well. For example, you wouldn’t a soccer theme on a site about American football.  Once you’ve selected your theme, it is time to install it.

Installing Your Theme

Now that you have the theme of your dreams, it’s time to get it up and running on the world wide web. The first thing you’ll need to do is go through any README files or other support documentation that was included with your theme, as they may contain important information regarding the correct installation of your theme.  Once you’ve become familiar with the installation process, you can upload the them to the correct location. Usually this location will be: /sites/all/themes/yourThemeName. (Note that your user name and hard drive precedes the previous file path.)

Now you’ll need to log into your site as an administrator to finish the process. You can access your site’s administrative interface by typing: “thenameofyoursite.com/admin”: in the URL address bar in your browser. Once you’re in the in the administrative interface, locate the Site Building area, and the click on Themes. You should see the theme you uploaded on the list. To set the theme as your default theme, simply check the appropriate boxes. You can make this theme your default theme by checking the radio box. Once you’ve finished clock on Save Configuration to finalize the process.

Having a good content management system is crucial to the success of any online business. With so many to choose from, it can be hard to decide which ones will live up to their promises. In fact, it can be difficult just to find the top three! Below we’ve given you an overview of the three best content management systems; Drupal, Joomla, and Mambo. The information below should aid you in conducting your own thorough investigation, based on your needs.

Drupal

Drupal has quickly become one of the most popular content management systems. It’s recent popularity boom is due to the fact that it is an open-source software, which means it can be improved by any developer with an interest in doing so. Drupal has been said to be a perfect solution for people who are building community-based websites such as forums. This is because one of it’s most notable features is it’s user permissions system. With it’s extensive administrative control, webmasters can control every aspect of their forum. Drupal is also preferred over Joomla in terms of development because it is easier to interact with and expand.

Joomla

Joomla has also gained popularity because of it’s powerful features and easy user interface. While Joomla also includes forum managing features, these features are not it’s strongest points. Among the more notable features of this CMS is it’s administrative functionality for image galleries, search engine optimization, shopping carts, and forum management. Some users choose Joomla over Drupal due to it’s user-friendly interface. Although there is some learning curve involved with Joomla it is often described as the easiest CMS around.

Mambo

The Mambo content management system was one of the first popular open source content managements systems. While it has been around for quite some time now, it still have a group of developers backing it that maintain it’s functionality and reliability. Even though it was one of the pioneer content management systems, it has fallen somewhat behind the newer CMS softwares available. The primary reason for it’s recently decreased popularity is it’s code incompatibility due to it’s age. For this reason many developers shy away from developing applications that can be used with Mambo. With each new advance in the consent management industry, Mambo becomes more obsolete.

Making the Decision

The first thing you’ll want to do when investigating your options, is go to the main site of each of the content management systems above. Make sure you review all of their features and ensure you’re going to be able to fulfill all of your needs by using the software. Even though one of the softwares may be more suitable for you it is still likely that you will need to install additional applications. It is very unlikely that you will find all of the desired features within one CMS, therefor you’ll want to do some research and find out which CMS has the compatible applications you need. Once you’ve made your decision, you can install the CMS of your choice simply with the Fantastico program.

Sometimes Google makes changes that are announced and other times they make remarkably silent changes.  In the case of Google Webmaster Tools, both types of changes have occurred – outdated software alerts and PageRank.  The recent changes are a reflection on how the company is constantly striving to keep up with its customers’ needs and desires.

Update alerts

In the case of the former, Google is going to incorporate a service that alerts webmasters of web site software updates and releases when these programs become outdated.  The reasoning behind this new service is that many web site owners are unaware of new updates.  Not applying them in a timely manner can lead to a hacked web site.  In fact, the company started out with merely sending alerts to web site owners of potential security issues and when this was well-received, Google decided to take it a step further.

The alerts are not limited to just software updates.  Google has set it so that web site owners will be notified of new modules or plugins belonging to existing programs (such as new Drupal modules or Joomla extensions).

How is Google managing to identify which web sites and programs need to be targeted?  The company parses the source code of each and every web page it crawls.  Normally, within the source code of these pages one will find software generated meta tags that indicate the program version number.  When a version number is lower than the currently updated program version, an alert is sent out to the web site owner. For the moment, update alerts depend upon software creators ensuring their version numbers are listed within the meta tags.

There has not been a specific time set for this newest feature to be rolled out, though Google indicates it will be soon.

PageRank

The other change that Google has made recently to its Webmaster Tool area is that of PageRank.  The removal of this particular feature was not announced – just silently passed off.  In the past, Google consistently informed web site owners that too much focus was being placed on PageRank when, in reality, it was not considered to be a tremendously valuable metric to follow.

The odd thing is, though PageRank has been removed from the Google Webmaster Tool area, it remains within the Google Toolbar.  Apparently it is considered to be too solid of a piece of the branding for Google to have it removed.

Though removed from the tools and left in the toolbar, Google has indicated the PageRank can still be considered useful.  It can indicate to the user how the web site is behaving within Google’s index.  If “green,” all is well.  If any other color, an investigation is warranted.

Google does wish to point its users to an FAQ page dedicated to Google and SEO – this area covers crawling, ranking, and indexing.  The fact is, PageRank is one of a couple hundred signals that can affect a web site’s ranking.

Whether silently removed or publicly preannounced, it seems Google is keeping up with its customers’ ongoing web site needs.

Being hacked is one of the unfortunate facts of life for a web site.  Of the most heavily attacked, open source and commercial CMS (Content Management Systems) programs are at the top of the list.  Secure information such as credit card numbers, banking information and other confidential items could be leaking from ones own web site and often one wouldn’t even be aware of it.  How can web site owners combat this constant barrage of attacks and security leaks?  Simply by utilizing security software that incorporates itself into an existing CMS setup.

CMS programs covered

SecureLive is a CMS security tool that easily incorporates into many major CMS programs – WordPress, Joomla, Magento and more.  The products offered by SecureLive seem to be more heavily geared toward Joomla but it appears as though the company is striving to ensure as many different CMS and PHP programs normally used are included.  One CMS program that it does not work with just yet is Drupal.  However, support for Drupal is pending and should be released soon.

Live monitoring

This program works in real-time and is a live monitoring service that increases the security for web sites containing secure information.  As soon as a web site has been attacked, SecureLive immediately sends a notification of the attack to the server administrator.  Information regarding the attacker is captured and saved.  A notification is also sent to the SecureLive staff enabling them to file a report with the appropriate entities so that immediate action can be taken against the attackers.  All alerts and notifications can be sent either by text messages or emails.

Products offered

SecureLive offers ten different products to suit specific needs.  There are products specific to online blogs, shopping carts, forms, forums and analytics.  All separate software programs run $197 each.  If needing a complete system encompassing all different aspects of an online web site, SecureLive offers SecureLiveMax.  At $497, this software is a combination of other products offered – SecureBLOG, SecureCART, SecureFORM, SecureFORUM and SecureANALYTICS.

Add-on services

Beyond the actual programs offered, SecureLive also offers add-on products.  SecureLive PLUS is an add-on that places a dedicated admin within one’s system to allow for system adjustments and quick follow ups on site security violations.  For a complete server security optimization, the company offers SecureRX as another product add-on.  For those who have had the misfortune of already being the victim of an attack, SecureLive also offers SecureRESCUE – a de-hacking service that repairs a hacked server and gets it back online as soon as possible.

Support

The SecureLive web site has a few areas one can utilize for support should it be needed.  The support forum area and Q&A area seem to be rather sparse but the company does offer a toll free support number to call.  Perhaps as the product grows and becomes more well-known, the support sections for the company’s web site will be expanded.

Conclusion

As threats and attacks to web sites increase on a daily basis, growing not only in number but sophistication, the need for employing good security measures is paramount.  One of a business’ most important assets can be their online web site – ensuring good customer relations, gather new customers and getting their product or service out there for the general surfing public.  Putting into place a good, solid security program to safeguard not only the web site but the secure information that is entailed with customer relations is just good business sense.

Though best known for its extensive suite of proprietary commercial products, as of late, Microsoft has been dabbling a lot more in the field of open-source development.  Many suspect that this is due to rising competition from major open-source players such as Red Hat, Adobe and Google.  It has just been revealed that Microsoft is working on a new content management software application along with a set of reusable compatible components.  Going by the codename of Orchard, the software details will be shared at the TechEd Europe event.  Perhaps the most surprising part about all of this is that Orchard is said to be a free open-source web CMS set to rival with popular systems such as Joomla, Mambo and Drupal.

While Microsoft is being tight-lipped and secretive about the project, we were able to gather some details on what is currently known about the Orchard CMS.

Orchard Overview

Orchard is Microsoft’s latest effort to distribute free open-source software with reusable components and a fully featured application capable of creating a wide variety of types of websites.  The company’s core team of expert ASP.NET developers is actively seeking contributions and guidance from the community of .NET programmers to help get the project off on the right in the early goings.  According to a representative from Microsoft, Bradley Millington, who has been anointed as Engineering Lead for the Orchid project, will be spearheading interactive discussions to invite the community to get actively involved on the ground floor.  Millington will be accepting input to get better understanding of what developers would like to see in the project, the components they envision for their own applications, and how to encourage the community to contribute to make the project a success.  Microsoft remarked that is open to discussing strategy, logistics, functionality and whatever else developers bring to the table.

Apparently, Orchard is not Microsoft’s first attempt in the open-source content management space.  A while back, it was reported that the company was working on a CMS project called Oxite.  In December of 2008, Microsoft made an alpha version of the Oxite source code available under the MS-P1 (Microsoft Public License).  Mary Joe Foley of ZDNet hinted that Orchard could be right on time and become one of the first projects announced for the CodePlex Foundation.  Created to allow for the exchange of code and collaboration among software vendors and the open-source developer community, the Foundation recently released the first working draft of its Project Acceptance and Operation Guidelines.  When Foley asked if Orchard was simply a revamped version Oxite under a different name, Microsoft did not respond.

We all know that Microsoft is very skilled at keeping secrets and rolling out big surprises.  Therefore, we just might have to wait until the TechEd Europe Session takes place on November 11 to get more comprehensive details on the Orchard project.  As soon we get something more concrete, we will surely try to pass along the news.

One of the more popular CMS (content management system) programs available on the web is Joomla.  Thousands of web sites viewable on the internet are powered by this extremely versatile and easy to use CMS program. The software has a rather extensive list of extensions available to add onto the product and one of the more popular types downloaded by many businesses is those that pertain to social networking and social media.

About Joomla

With its original creation back in 2000, Joomla has grown as an open source content management solution to encompass an ever-growing list of extensions, themes and a community of over 200,000 users and contributors all helping make it one of the best bits of programming available.

Joomla is the perfect solution for many different styles of web sites.  Whether commercial, media-specific, government, educational or as an intranet solution, Joomla can easily tackle the task at hand.

The program is very simple to setup and Joomla’s site is crammed with information with regard to how to setup the program and getting started using the program.  Additionally, the company’s web site includes an online demonstration to try out in case of uncertainty.

Social media for business

The latest and greatest medium available for businesses to interact with their customers and clients is social media.  Social media comes in various forms and each form caters to a specific kind of media (graphic, text, video, audio, etc.).  Businesses are quickly finding out that utilizing different types of social media is the key to garnering new customers, keeping old customers and getting feedback from customers.

Two of the more popular types of social media are micro-blogging and blogging.  Sites such as Twitter and Identi.ca are examples of micro-blogging – communication mediums that only allow for small amounts of text to be published.  On the other end of this spectrum is blogging.  Blogging allows for much longer bits of text and allows for incorporation of other social media types such as YouTube video inclusion.

Social networking related Joomla extensions

Among the hundreds upon hundreds of extensions available to add onto Joomla, there are a number of great social networking specific modules to be found.  For those businesses who have Facebook and Gmail that they would like integrated into their web site, Jbolo is a perfect addition.  Users adding this module onto their Joomla site will enable the two sites to integrate easily.  If wanting to embed videos but maybe not wanting to embed those from YouTube, hwdVideoShare is a great little module that is getting quite a lot of reviews and positive feedback.

The list of social media modules and extensions available can be found simply by going to the Joomla site Extensions area and typing in “social network” within the search bar.  At last check, there were 38 different social media extensions available for downloading.

Final Assessment

When it comes to easy web site administration and content management, Joomla has got businesses covered.  Once ready to take the social media plunge, it’s nice to know that Joomla also has businesses covered with its array of social media add-ons available to the public.  Make your business web site social networking savvy and check out Joomla today.

Securing your web site may be one of the most important things you can do to ensure your data is safe from hackers.  Any hole left open is an invitation to nefarious attacks and these attacks can lead to not only leaking or usage of your private information but information that belongs to your customers.  Proper security measures effectively put into place can deter attacks and give you and your customers peace of mind.

How hackers work

First, exactly how do hackers get into your site and gather information?  Above all else, hackers are patient as much of their work involves guessing.  After carefully watching your web site for a time, the hacker will peruse cookies that are created and see if changes to the cookies garners success, explore the source code of each of your site’s pages and often will create an account to view the authorization process.  Hackers spend a great deal of time processing the information they gather to enable them to see where the holes are and how they can exploit these areas.

Update your CMS

One of the very first and simplest things to help secure your web site is to ensure you have the most current update of your CMS (content management system).  Software such as Drupal, Joomla, WordPress and many other mainstream CMS programs are constantly tested and updated to close up any unsecured areas.  Each day you let an update slide is another day a hacker has to get to your secure information.

Change the defaults

CMS programs often are automatically setup with default information.  After installing your CMS program, ensure you are not using the default administrator user name (often simply admin) and you have changed any default passwords.  You can be sure a hacker will know all the default information with regard to the particular CMS software your site is running on.

PHP error reporting

PHP is a very handy bit of web site programming but unfortunately can tell a hacker a lot about your system and your site if the error reporting level is set to show too much information in error messages.  You can greatly reduce this risk by completely turning off PHP error reporting and setting your configuration to not display errors should one occur.  If you are unable to do this yourself, request it of your system administrator or from support at your web hosting company.

The htaccess file

By properly setting up your htaccess file, you can also keep hackers out of secure files.  First, you should ensure no one can access the actual htaccess file itself accidentally by including the following within the htaccess file:

<files .htaccess>

order allow, deny

deny from all

</files>

If there are any other files you wish to keep private, you can use the same coding and replace .htaccess with the name of your secure file.

Secure passwords

Lastly, it almost goes without saying but always use very strong and secure passwords.  It is very unwise to use your birth date or passwords that are very easy to remember.  If you can remember it easily, it’s a safe bet that a hacker will figure it out in a matter of seconds.  There are many sites online that can help you create a good, solid and secure password.

Conclusion

Being diligent with the security of your web site will not only benefit you but will also benefit your customers.  Take a few moments to go over the tips listed above and don’t give a hacker a chance.

Joomla and Drupal are easily the two most popular options on the open-source CMS market.  Both systems took tremendous leaps in the right direction with the releases of Joomla 1.5 and Drupal 5.0.  You could say Drupal went a little further as it is currently on stable version 6.13.  This debate always makes for a good discussion but which CMS is really better?  It is no secret that Joomla and Drupal both have their respective fan bases.  Perhaps the best to analyze this largely contested battle is to judge these platforms by what they are good at.

Larger Projects

Drupal is often said to be one of the best open -source systems for large extensible sites.  This is because it offers better overall support for social networking, multimedia, documentation management, SSL and permission capabilities.  Though it appears to be lacking features in comparison to Joomla, Drupal’s lean and focused nature gives it a distinct advantage.  The software is based purely on necessity opposed to glamor.  Its framework is more focused on extensibility, providing developers with a way to easily tap into the core functionality.  Drupal does not try to pack in all the small features.  Instead, it delivers all the essentials and opens itself up to endless enhancements.

Ease of Use

Drupal is incredibly efficient as a content management tool, but even if its proponents will tell you that it comes with a very steep learning curve.  In addition, it takes a lot of work to get the software up and running efficiently.  Joomla on the other hand, is renowned throughout the world for being a user-friendly tool that requires virtually no technical experience at all.  Even though it is a bit cluttered, the back-end allows you to get around Joomla pretty easily and access all the modules and tools that come along with the package.  This CMS is also fairly simple to customize as a wide variety of templates are available to instantly change the look and feel of your site.  That is not to say that quality Drupal themes are not out there, but they are much harder to find.  When it comes to simplicity and ease of use, Joomla wins hands down.

Add-on Functionality

Like many open-source content management systems, both Joomla and Drupal are highly extensible, able to enjoy add-on functionality provided by modules and plugins.  However, add-on functionality with Drupal is far more powerful than Joomla, mainly because of its codebase.  Additionally, many of the Joomla modules require a considerable amount of hacking of the core functionality in order to get the full effect.  Because every extension is an entirely different animal, these add-ons don’t always integrate seamlessly with one another which often leads to numerous problems.  An issue with a single module could result in mass chaos for your whole Joomla site.

Conclusion

After reading this article, it should be clear to see that both Joomla and Drupal have their pros and cons.  The best way to decide would be to first determine what you intend to use the software for and then base your choice on those requirements.  One thing is for sure – these platforms will continue to be enhanced and the end, the communities of both will come out on top.

The web hosting business is driven by powerful systems and technologies, most of which are enabled by software tools.  Software is also a major draw of hosting packages as web hosts tend to offer a myriad of free programs.  Let’s go over some of the software you are bound to encounter when on the hunt for a web hosting service.

Control Panels

One type of software you will have frequent and direct access to is the control panel.   This application will provide the interface that allows you to set up email accounts, manage your webmail, add on domains and various other administrative tasks.  Some web hosting providers offer third-party control panels such as Plesk and cPanel while others develop their own custom programs.  Although the features and functionality may vary, all control panels strive to meet one goal – provide you with authority over your web hosting account.

Site Builders

In the web hosting world, site builders are exactly what they sound like: tools that allow you to create your website.  Almost every hosting provider offers some type of site builder or at least support for others.  This could be integrated utilities such as RV Builder or compatible applications like Microsoft FrontPage or Dreamweaver.  Regardless of the vendor, most site builders cater to the users by enabling you to build a site from scratch with pre-designed templates and drag-and-drop functionality.

Content Management Systems

A content management system or CMS, can be viewed as a more robust and capable alternative to the traditional site builder.  These programs offer features that surpass the norm, allowing you to effectively manage the content on websites of various sizes.  Some of today’s most well known content management systems are totally free to use.  These variations include open-source applications like Mambo, PHP-Nuke, Drupal and the award-winning Joomla CMS.  The CMS has become so popular that many customers flock to hosting solutions based solely on the content management tools offered.

Server-Side Scripts

Although server-side scripting refers to programming technologies, these languages and frameworks are actually enabled through software packages.  For example, a web host that offers PHP, Perl or ASP.NET is able to do so because they have these software applications installed on their web servers.  This allows you to enhance your HTML pages with dynamic, interactive features.  Server-side programming languages get more advanced with each release so there is virtually no limit to the functionality your site can enjoy.

Mail Servers

The mail server is one of the most important elements of a hosting package.  This type of program acts a transport agent that processes email from within the same domain.  Some of the most common examples of mail servers include Sendmail, qmail, Exim and Microsoft Exchange.  These applications typically work in conjunction with mail clients such as Outlook and Eudora, which forward messages to the server.

What’s Your Software?

There is definitely no shortage of software tools in the web hosting business.  Whether you are a novice or pro, your needs modest or complex, the features you get the most out of will surely be enabled by one form of software or another.

You just can’t travel the open-source CMS circuit without hearing one word: Joomla.  This system is easily one of the most talked about software packages on the open-source market or anywhere for that matter, always being praised for its ease of use and plethora of beneficial uses.  Let’s walk through a little history to find out how the mighty Joomla CMS came about.

How it Began

The Joomla project began as a fork of the original Mambo content management system, as reflected in the traits embedded in version 1.0.  At this time, the name Mambo was trademarked by Miro International Pty Ltd., which established a non-profit foundation with the purpose to fund the project and keep it protected against lawsuits.  The original development team made the claim that several provisions of the foundation’s structure contradicted previous agreements set forth by the elected Mambo Steering Committee.  These provisions where said to lack the necessary consultation with key stake holders and violate the project’s core open-source values.

And the Controversy Pot Stirs

Members of the Mambo development team started a website called OpenSourceMatters with the sole purpose of distributing information to the community of developers, web designers and end-users.  Andrew Eddie, better known as the “Master Chief”, addressed the community with a statement that touched on the controversy at hand.  Roughly one thousand people joined the OpenSourceMatters website within a single day, most of them posting words of encouragement and openly supporting the development team.  The website received a jolt of notoriety, resulting in news articles regarding the turmoil being posted by sources such as News Forge, eWeek and ZDNet.com.

The ordeal sparked deeply held feelings in the free software community about what shall qualify as open-source.  From there, the forums of many other open-source projects became active, seeing postings from communities for and against the both sides of the argument.  Over the next two week’s following the initial Eddie statement, announcement teams were re-organized and the eventual Joomla community continued to expand.   With the aid of the SFLC (Software Freedom Law Center), Eben Moglen was instrumental in the core Joomla team be formed in August of 2005, indicated by his blog entry and a related announcement.  To the current day, the SFLC still provides legal guidance for those involved in the Joomla project.

It’s Official

Joomla was officially announced on September 1, 2005.  One September 7, 2005, the core development team called out for logo submissions from the community, encouraging members to vote on the logos they preferred.  Joomla 1.0 was officially announced on September 16, 2005, being released as a re-branded version of Mambo 4.5.2.3 equipped with bug and minor security fixes.  With their full attention on the new project, the developers stepped away from Mambo completely in favor of the Joomla’s rapid popularity.

The CMS won numerous awards throughout 2006 and 2007, paving the way for Joomla 1.5 on January 22, 2008.  Although Mambo is still supported and available, the Joomla project has since surpassed it and most of the competition on the market, making it the fastest growing open-source CMS in existence.