Archive for November, 2009

Benefits and Features of Joomla

Friday, November 13th, 2009

Benefits and Features

One of his greatest potential of this CMS is the large number of existing extensions programmed by its user community that increase the likelihood of Joomla with new features that are easily integrated into it. Joomla CMS should only take care of the information you want to publish, because the system will manage all administrative and other technical details.

  • Organization Web Site: Joomla is ready to efficiently organize the contents of your site into sections and categories, making it easier navigability for users and to create a robust, orderly and simple for administrators. From the Joomla Administrator panel you can create, edit and delete sections and categories on your site in the way that suits you.
  • Published Content: With Joomla CMS you can create and edit unlimited pages from a simple editor that allows text formatting with styles and images desired. The contents are fully editable and modifiable.
  • Scalability and deployment of new features: Joomla offers the possibility of installing, uninstalling, and managing components and modules, value added services to visitors of your website, for example, image galleries, forums, newsletters, classifieds, etc..
  • User Administration: Joomla allows you to store data of registered users and also the ability to send mass e-mails to all users. The user management is hierarchical, and different user groups have different levels of authority / permissions within the management and administration of the site.
  • Design and aesthetics of the site: You can change the whole aspect of the site only with a few clicks, thanks to the templates that use Joomla.
  • Navigation and menu: Fully editable from the admin panel of Joomla
  • Image Manager: Joomla has a utility for uploading images to the server and use throughout the site.
  • Disposal of modules coded: A site created with Joomla, the position of modules can be accommodated as desired.
  • Surveys: Joomla has a voting system and dynamic surveys with results in percentage bars.
  • News Feed: Joomla’s built-in system as RSS news feed / XMS automatic generation
  • Advertising: It is possible to advertise on the site using the Banner Manager
  • Traffic statistics: information browser, OS, and details of documents (pages) most viewed.

Features Web page publishing in Joomla:

Automation in the publication: The pages and documents can be programmed with Joomla publication date and expiration date. Ie a document can be programmed to automatically post to get a certain deadline, and then also automatically Unpublish on another date.

Archives and History: The pages have old or outdated publications may be sent to an “archive” storage without having to delete them. This also gives surfers the opportunity to consult old articles or previous documents in history.

Formats reading: Each document is generated automatically by Joomla in PDF format, printable version, and XML.

Sending E-mail: Joomla users can automatically send to a friend by email each published document.

Content Rating: Site visitors can rate the quality of what was published.

Comments: (optional) Users can discuss their views or express their concerns on the same page of content.

Joomla CMS – Content Management System

Friday, November 13th, 2009

Joomla offer a content management system that allows web sites to create elegant, dynamic and interactive. It’s perfect for your organization, allowing quickly creating a complete web portal or a teacher where you can post news, blogs, manage staff pages, job listings or to download documents without the need for specific expertise .

Joomla, content management system built with open source PHP under a GPL license. and is freely available for anyone wanting to use it. This content management system is used to publish on the Internet and intranets using a MySQL database. In Joomla! include features such as page caching to improve performance, web indexing, RSS feed, printable versions of pages, flash news, blogs, forums, polls (surveys), calendars, Web site search, and internationalization of the language.

The publication of content and its update is done through a web browser from any computer connected to the Internet. The administrator will access with your password to this administration panel from which you can perform all operations, both the management modules and components will be explained later:

The control panel is divided into 4 areas:

  1. Top Menu: This is the navigation with paragraphs down and their options.
  2. Toolbar: provides the administrator with various tools for creating and manipulating content.
  3. Information Bar: We provided details on the site name, the current section of work, the name of the user identified as an administrator, you have many messages from other administrators, and number of users that are connected at their website at that time.
  4. Work area: the area that is updated when a selection is made from the Tools menu. Allows you to select the elements that we want to work and edit (or insert content).

Components and Modules are components that add functionality to Joomla, but not the same. If you used other web content management systems (like Drupal), it is possible to confuse terms. What in Drupal, to give an example, we define as modules, Joomla modules would be equivalent to what in these other systems are the blocks.

In summary:

  • When we speak of components in Joomla, we refer to small independent applications each handling the information within Joomla. The basic installation of Joomla brings incorporated several components in addition to publishing news or manage users allow us to create a directory of Web links, see news from other external sites publish surveys and advertising, etc..
  • While the modules are elements of the system information blocks that are in different positions or areas of the template. Show secondary information, simplified and brief taken from the database and then loaded on the periphery of the template (usually the lateral columns, the header or footer.

In terms of design, this application is based on templates, which allows us to change the design of the site easily (there are over 1000 templates for download, and install in the system).

The users are using this manager is unlimited:

  • Corporate websites or portals
  • E-Commerce
  • Small Business Sites
  • Websites of organizations or NGOs
  • Governmental Applications
  • Corporate Intranets and Extranets
  • Websites of Schools or Groups
  • Personal or Family Pages
  • Community Portals
  • Magazines and Newspapers

Many organizations have needs that go beyond what is available in the basic Joomla package. For them, the application provides a powerful application architecture that allows developers to create sophisticated add-ons that extend the power of Joomla into virtually unlimited directions.

Create your website easily with Drupal

Friday, November 13th, 2009

Drupal is a content management system for Web sites. It allows to publish articles, images, or other files and added services like forums, surveys, polls, blogs and user management and permissions.

For those interested in taking a look at the features of Drupal then unartículo LISNews originally published by Joseph A. Reyero

General Characteristics

On-line A robust online help system and help pages for modules ‘kernel’, both for users and administrators.

Search All content in Drupal is fully indexed in real time and is available at any time.

Open Source Drupal source code is freely available under the terms of the GNU / GPL. Unlike other systems, blogs or content management owners, you can extend Drupal or adapt as needed.

Modules The Drupal community has contributed many modules which provide functionality such as ‘category page’, jabber authentication, private messages, bookmarks, etc..

Customizing A robust personalization environment is implemented in the core of Drupal. Both the content and presentation can be individualized according the user-defined preferences.

Drupal friendly URLs using Apache mod_rewrite to create URLs that are manageable by users and search engines.

User Management

User Authentication Users tri-fold register and log on locally or using an external authentication system like Jabber, Blogger, LiveJournal or another Drupal site. To use in an intranet, Drupal can integrate with an LDAP server.

Role-based permissions Drupal administrators do not have to set permissions for each user. Instead, they can assign permissions to a ‘role’ and group users for roles.

Content Management

Version Control System version control and audit follow Drupal allows totally successive updates of content: what has changed, the time and date, who has changed, and more. It also keeps comments on the successive changes or undo changes recovering an earlier version.

Permanent links (Permalinks) All content created in Drupal has a permanent link associated with it so it can be linked externally without fear that the link fails in the future.

Content Object (Node) The content created in Drupal is, functionally, an object (node). This allows a uniform treatment of information, as the same moderation queue for shipments of various types, promote any of these objects to the main page or allow comments-or not on each object.

Templates (Templates) system Drupal themes separates content from presentation enabling easy control and change the look of the website. You can create templates with HTML and / or PHP.

Drupal content syndication format exports the contents RDF / RSS to be used by other websites. This allows anyone with a ‘news aggregator’, such as NetNewsWire or Radio UserLand view the content published on the web from your desktop.

Blogging

News aggregator includes a powerful Drupal News Aggregator for reading and post links to news from other websites. It incorporates a cache system in the database with configurable timing.

Support Blogger API Blogger API allows a Drupal site is updated by using various tools that can be ‘web tools’ or ‘desktop tools’ to provide an editing environment more manageable.

Platform

Independence database While most Drupal installations using MySQL, there are other options. Drupal comes with a ‘layer of abstraction for database’ which is currently implemented and maintained to MySQL and PostgresSQL, although it allows to easily incorporate support for other databases.

Drupal Cross-platform is designed from the start to be multi-platform. It can work with Apache or Microsoft IIS as web server and on systems such as Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X. Furthermore, to be implemented in PHP, is completely portable.

Location Drupal Multiple languages and is intended for an international audience and provides options for creating a multilingual portal. All text can be easily translated using a web interface, by importing existing translations or integrating other translation tools such as GNU ettext

Analysis and Management

Web-based administration and configuration management system can be performed entirely in a browser and does not require any additional software.

Analysis, Monitoring and Statistics Drupal can be displayed on the websites of government reports on referrals (inbound links), content popularity, or how users navigate through the site.

Records and reports all activity and system events are captured in an ‘event log’, which can be viewed by an administrator.

Characteristics of community

Comments linked Drupal you provide a powerful model that allows comments linked easily follow and participate in the discussion on the commentary. Comments are hierarchical as in a newsgroup or a forum.

Polls Drupal includes a module that allows administrators and / or users to create online surveys are completely configurable.

Includes discussion forums forums Drupal to create lively and dynamic community sites.

Collaborative Paper This feature is unique to Drupal and allows you to create a project or “book” to be written and other users to contribute content. The content is organized into easily navigable pages.

Performance and scalability

Drupal congestion control incorporates a congestion control mechanism that lets you enable and disable certain modules or blocks, depending on server load. This mechanism is fully configurable and adjustable.

System Cache The cache mechanism eliminates queries data increasing performance and reducing server load.

What is Content Management Systems(CMS)

Friday, November 13th, 2009

Content Management Systems

The need to constantly update the content of websites linked to users looking to manage their sites themselves, has led to a spread in the use of content management systems.

A Content Management System (CMS content management system) is software that allows creation and content management by users. The system can independently control design, structure and content.

Increasingly, users want to manage their own websites without relying on third parties, which together with the relative simplicity of use and implementation of the CMS has caused a boom in its use.

There are many CMS systems, both commercial and open source, among which we highlight some as Drupal, Joomla and Zikula.

There are many factors that lead to choose between different commercial CMS, open source or developed to measure.

To correctly choose a CMS must take into account various factors, including:

  • Build on what we need, not necessarily the greatest.
  • Requirements unavoidable, as the need for the website is accessible or technological support we have.
  • Profile of users. Not only must we take into account what can be done, but the ease with which they may be.
  • If you choose an open source CMS, to assess their support from the community.
  • Letting advice. Many companies offer support in implementing CMS and develop their own, that experience is invaluable when determining the best solution for some given requirements.