Wordpress review

• Rating: 8/10
• Release version: 2.1
• License: GNU/GPL, Open Source
• Homepage: http://wordpress.org
• OpenSourceCMS.com demo
• CMSMatrix.org listing

Wordpress is the most used blogging platform in the world, and for a good reason: it's easy to install, easy to use and is supported by a vibrant community that makes significat contributions. Many people use it to rant, blog about their passions or even run their online businesses.

I think most people are attracted to Wordpress because it's not limited as other blogging applications (think Blogeer or Wordpress.com) and the fact that it simply works - once you've installed it you can go straight to work without any other customization (still, it's good to tinker with the settings!).

Wordpress requirements:

PHP (v4.2 or newer) and MySQL (v3.23.x or newer) are required. Installing takes only a couple of minutes at the most, and even someone who is new to the Internet can do it without any hassles.

Wordpress learning curve and usability:

Wordpress is extremely easy to learn for anybody who has some computer experience. If you can create folders and use a document editor it shouldn't take more than a half hour to an hour to get used to the system.

The administration back-end is very simple and laid out clearly: "Write", "Manage", "Comments", "Presentation" and the others are pretty self explanatory and most people get used to it in no time whatsoever.

Another thing that takes Wordpress 2.1 closer to a content management system, and not just a blogging platform, is the possibility to specify a certain page or post as the frontpage. In the 1.x series of Wordpress you had to install a plugin or mess around with the index.php file to get the desired result.

A little bit about search engine optimization: the search engines simply love Wordpress - the light and valid output code (depends on the webmaster too, of course), the option for trackbacks and pings, configurable and clean permalinks, all of this is spider candy. If you have great content and a few good links then you'll be on the road to good rankings soon enough.

Wordpress security:

Unfortunately, one of popularity's bad side-effects is that every bug will almost surely be discovered - that's why it's crucial to update an install as soon as patches are released. There have been a few notorious cases of security exploits being used to hack Wordpress blogs, the last one targeting search engine optimization blogs (more details). However, most people will be safe if they patch their installations with the latest updates, so security is not that much of a concern.

Another good thing about Wordpress is that if you plan on making a site where you have contributors there are different access levels that you can grant to your users - you will be able to control what appears on your site and still give contributors some of the freedom they deserve.

One of the best Wordpress plugins that helps control the scourge of blogs - comment spam - is Akismet. Whether you care about your rankings or the way your blog appears to your visitors, or even both, spam does big damage everywhere it appears. Akismet is a great service, and although it has some false-positives is the best spam stopper out there.

Wordpress plugins and applications:

Wordpress has really benefited from having a great community - there are a lot of plugins that can extend its basic capabilities; some of the really good ones are:

• Akismet - the best plugin for comment spam actually comes bundled with the default Wordpress installation. All you have to do is get an api key by registering for a free Wordpress.com account and then activate the plugin from the "Plugins" menu in the blog back-end.
• Adsense Injector - for those that want to monetize their blog the best bet is usually contextual advertising, and that means Adsense from Google. After you activate it you'll see a lot of options: you can choose if your ad is to appear on the homepage, full posts, static pages, category pages and/or archive pages. You can also define all the colors in the block, ad formats, number of ads, ad positioning (set it to random to minimize ad blindness) and the option to not show ads for the blog administrator.
• Google Sitemap generator - the plugin creates an XML sitemap (that is actually compliant with Yahoo and MSN too) that will help the search engines index your site better, especially if your post count goes into the thousands. Get more info about the sitemap format at Sitemaps.org, the project's official site.
• Exec-PHP - sometimes you just need to execute a few lines of PHP, but Wordpress doesn't allow it. This plugin comes in handy just for that.
• PXS Mail Form - exposing your email address is not always the best ideea so contact forms are a usual part for many websites. PXS Mail Form creates a contact form with configurable error messages, redirect after form submission, CC sender and mail subject.
• WP Cache - considering most webmasters host their blogs on shared servers, site performance is a very important concern when you start getting hordes of visitors. WP Cache helps take off some of the load from the PHP compiler by storing the pages as static files. Caching is especially useful when you get Dugg, Slashdotted or end up on the Del.icio.us frontpage.
• Related posts - this plugin is a good ideea for when you have first time visitors to one of your posts. If they're interested in information on a certain subject they will most likely want more of the same; this is what "Related posts" does, it shows links to other pages with the same subject. It's also good for SEO - when the site linking structure is more developed you increase your chances for indexing and ranking.
• Lightbox JS v2 - if you have images on your site the lightbox is a nice classy touch (see a demo of the script).

Of course, there are a lot more very useful plugins but these are the ones I used the most. Take a look over the plugin list at Wordpress.org if you need to extend your blog's capabilities.
source: http://needforcontent.com

Drupal tutorial - installation

For this install I assume that you have a server that has Apache, PHP and MySQL installed (it doesn't matter if it's on Windows or Linux). Also, most modern hosting companies offer Cpanel and PhpMyAdmin so I'll use them in my tutorials.

Here's how to install Drupal:

1. Get the latest Drupal release from the official Drupal site. On the right hand side there is a menu with a link to the latest stable package - click on that and download it to your computer.

2. Extract the files from the downloaded archive to the htdocs or public_html folder. If you are on a local server extract them directly to the folder where you want to install it.

If you want to upload it you'll have to use a FTP client (I use FireFTP , a FTP addon for Firefox) to upload the files to the server.

3. You'll want to create a database and user for Drupal. If you have CPanel you can do this by clicking the MySQL Databases icon.

4. Create a new database. We'll name ours "test"; make yours a little bit more decriptive :).

5. Create a new user and password from the same page.

6. Add the user to the database you created earlier.

6.1. An optional step before you log out of CPanel: open the File Manager from CPanel and browse to where your Drupal files are (usually in the "public_html" folder). Click on the "Create New Folder" link on the top left of the page and create a folder named "files". This will be used to store images and other uploads made during the use of the site.

7. Go to the browser address bar and input the address of the new Drupal installation; hit enter and next you shoud see the Drupal installer. Enter the name of the database, user and password and click on "Save configuration".

8. If everything is ok you'll get the same page as below:

9. Now go to the base URL where you'll see the welcome message and default theme.

10. The first thing you should do now is to create a new account - the first user is the super admin so do this quickly. Click the "Create new account" link on the left of the page and put in a username and email address. Make sure the email is real because that is where you'll receive your password (however once in the account you can change it to whatever you desire).

That's all. I hope you enjoyed my visual walkthrough of the Drupal intallation.

source: http://needforcontent.com

Drupal Tutorials: Installing modules and themes

Drupal tutorial - installing modules and themes

Now that you have clean Drupal install it's time to start customizing. The best way for this is to look for the modules that will give your site the functionality you want it to have and then grab a theme that looks nice and fits your needs.

The first thing you should do is to go to Drupal's main site and take a look at the available themes and modules. Pick the ones that you want and download them to your desktop; be careful to download the versions that match you installation - modules for Drupal 4.7 will have a "4.7-" in the name and ones for Drupal 5.x will have a "5.x-" in the filename.

So, now that you have the files on your desktop follow the next steps:

1. Log into your websites' CPanel and click on File Manager.

2. Browse with the file manager to Drupal's themes directory (it's in yoursite.com/themes) and then click on "Upload file(s)".

3. For each file that you want to upload click on one of the browse buttons, select the file and then click on "Open". After you have selected all the files click on the "Upload button" on your browser and in a few moments the files will be uploaded. Make sure that you don't mix them up and upload the wrong files in the wrong folders.

4. Do the same for your modules (the modules directory is at yoursite.com/modules).

5. Now you have to extract the files from the archives. Go to the modules and themes directories, click on an archive and then select "Extract file contents" from the links that appear in the top right part of the webpage. Do this for every archive, both modules and themes.

You should log out of CPanel, you won't need it anymore.

6. Go to your site and log in to the Drupal administration interface. To see what modules you have uploaded go to Administer -> Site building -> Modules. You will see a few lists depending on what modules are on the server; the modules I uploaded are Meta tags, Pathauto and Webform and are in the "Others" list.

Under each module description you'll see what module dependencies are - for example Pathauto depends on the Path module so I will have to enable them both to use them. Check the boxes near the corresponding modules and then click on "Save configuration" to enable them.

After the modules are enabled you can configure them from the Administer -> Site configuration page.

7. To see the themes you have installed go to Administer -> Site building -> Themes. You'll be presented with a list of the themes that are on your server; to enable them you have to check the boxes, but as a super-admin you can activate them even if they aren't enabled.

If they are enabled, at the right of the themes will appear a "Configure" link that lets you enable or disable certain elements like site name, favicon, search box, logo and upload a custom logo or favicon.

source: http://needforcontent.com

About Drupal CMS

Drupal is a very powerful content management system but it's pretty clear that beginners have a though time using it, and the Drupal specific terms aren't at all helpful. Yes, the taxonomy system is how content is categorized but why the hell don't they just say categories?

What are nodes, pages, stories, blocks and all those other terms that Drupal is using?

Taxonomies:

Let's see what the Drupal handbook has to say about the taxonomy system:

Nodes can be organized into categories, also called taxonomies. Forums are an example of content nodes organized by category. Categories can be hierarchical, where one parent category contains multiple child categories.

Yup - taxonomies are categories. The thing that makes them different from other category systems is that they can be used as tags (set them when you write a page) and you can have the same page in more than one category at a time (some content systems don't have this option).

This makes the taxonomy system very powerful and to call taxonomies just categories would be an understatement; still, if that makes it more comfortable for you just do it!

Nodes:

In Drupal, a node is a piece of content. It may be in the form of a page, blog post, story, poll, forum thread or any other content type. But why is the content called nodes and not just what it actually is - a page or blog post?

Although, I must confess, I'm not sure about this, I believe it's Durpal's modular nature that calls for this way of organization. As long as you remember that a node is a piece of content you'll be fine - just like I am :) .

Input formats:

This one will get your panties in a bunch if you don't know its importance. The input formats are a set of filters that will go through the text you submit and then process it before display to the user. There are 3 input formats, one of them being set as default (when creating a node you can choose another input format just for that node).

The default for every installation is "Filtered HTML", which you should leave if you plan on having a site where there are contributors. This filter allows only a few tags to be used (a, em, strong, code, ul, ol, li, cite, dt, dd, dl), the rest will be stripped by the system.

The "Full HTML" allows all HTML tags to be used, and "PHP code" lets you run PHP code. These should only be available to trusted editors or administrators, as they can do some damage if used with malicious intent.

Throttle:

This is a useful feature for heavy trafficed sites, and even better if you get slashdotted or dugg. When your site gets a certain number of visitors (you can define this) modules start being turned off to take some of the pressure off the site.

After you enable the throttle module you will have the option to select which modules are to be throttled, and I suggest throttling everything except the basic modules that run your site.

That's it for this tutorial. Hope it helped!

source: http://needforcontent.com