Articles

Whenever someone decides to launch a website, or hired to do so for a client, he’s given three broad choices which will define how they’ll proceed: static HTML, a CMS or Flash. The former being practically dead due to inflexibility and the latter being not only inflexible, but extremely costly to produce, the CMS route seems a dead end; more specifically, the Open Source CMS route.

Dead end it is. Try raising the simple, innocuous question “Which CMS should I chose for my site?” on any public forum and a war seems to spring right out of nowhere. The fighting fractions are what I usually call The Big Three: Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress fans. But is this all there is to it? Does the Open Source CMS universe revolve around only three players? Given the Open Source spirit of Freedom of choice, one would hardly expect this to be the case. In fact, it isn’t. There is more to Open Source CMS than meets the eye.

Read my guest post on the SpeckyBoy.com design magazine

Joomla! is often paralleled to point-and-click presentation software, such as Impress or PowerPoint, in terms of ease of use. Granted, Joomla! makes it extremely easy to build a site having no knowledge of its internal working, or even what HTML is. However, in order to build a stunning site you need a bit more than that. It’s the tricks in the web builder’s bag which determine his success, both in customer satisfaction and financial terms.

Some of the fundamental techniques for creating compelling sites is your ability to master the use of modules. Often overlooked, modules are the most practical way to integrate diverse content on a single page. Leveraging their use from mere content bearers to integral parts of your content can transform your site from boring to intriguing. The following technique has proved itself again and again in a vast array of site genres. I call it the "Faux module positions" technique.

Read the full article on WebAppers.com

If you manage an ad-supported site, you are probably aware of the problem I’m going to discuss. Some of your ads are stellar, some others are stubborn underachievers, to the extent you might consider them a waste of screen real estate. The truth about ads is that they are position sensitive. Where you put them determines, for the most part, their success. You can’t avoid all bad positions altogether but you can create new competent positions no-one has ever told you about. Implementing this in Joomla! takes 5 minutes and requires no programming skills!

Read the full article on CMSmoz.com

If you are a serious web developer, you might have already figured out that performing experiments and untested upgrades on production servers is a disaster waiting to happen, bringing down the live site with them. Staging live servers (in the form of dev.example.com) usually don't cut it either, especially if you have a lot of file transferring or editing to do. However, local development is still a kludge, as you have to develop in a sub-directory, something like http://localhost/mysite. This has all sorts of implications, the most evident of which being that it breaks cross-content links if you try to pack it and deploy it back to the live site.

Ideally, you would need to develop in subdomains, something like http://mysite.localhost, which would mean that you have the flexibility of local development with the peace of mind of not having to develop in a sub-directory. But, face it. Setting up subdomains is an involving process, requiring hacking around your Apache configuration files. This is suboptimal if you want to do it regularly. Unless you come up with a way to turn http://mysite.localhost to automatically understand where it should find its files.

This article will explain you how to combine WampServer and BIND to create this kind of Holy Grail local web development server on Windows. You will configure a single DNS entry and a single virtual host in order to create a server which can handle infinite subdomains! The only pre-requisite is having a fixed IP address for your server. Well, even 127.0.0.1 will do if you can't do anything better than that!

Read more: The Holy Grail of local web development servers