For open source web designers, a solid hosting platform can often times make the difference between a cumbersome, vulnerable, sloth site or a nimble, secure, snappy web presence.
Up until recently our choices have been very limited, if you client was set on a particular hosting plan you would try to make it work on that. If the budget afforded it, you would try to get out of a shared plan and into a VPS or dedicated server so you can tweak the environment for Joomla!
The problem is, when you jump to VPS or Dedicated... you get all the headaches of being responsible for that level of configuration and support... all of a sudden a shared hosting plan looks really nice again.
I think this is where cloud hosting solutions can come to the rescue. At a very basic level, some cloud hosting packages are just a big bucket of space that you have to figure out how to shape into something usable... that is intimidating and expensive.
That is where a solution like cloudaccess.net comes into play. It's like wordpress.com , but for Joomla! Imagine, a cloud based hosting platform customized just for Joomla!, with automatic security updates for the core software always in place! It sounds like a dream, I will be testing this out an a new build out over the next month and write up a full review of my findings.
The Open Source Awards is an annual online event held by Packt
Publishing to distinguish excellence among Open Source projects.
Now in its fifth year, the Award, formerly known as the Open Source
Content Management System (CMS) Award, is designed to encourage,
support, recognize and reward not only CMSes but a wider range of Open
Source projects.
The Awards are split up into two main stages. Firstly, nominations
will begin on August 9. This is your chance to put
forward your favorite Open Source project in each category to go through
to the final stage of voting. The top five projects
with the most nominations in each category will go through to the final
stage of voting. The nominations will end on September 17.
I have switched over to the Blip.tv video hosting and
distribution system. This should help with bandwidth and cross
platform watchability. I think the videos are actually too long for the
free service encoding to flv, it fails... but the MP4 should work fine.
I tried to work in the audience group audio, but it did not sync well...
so I cut it out for now. Next month we will try again on that. But
otherwise here is the continued survey of Joomla! 1.6, K2, Zoo, and
jSeblod CCKs with an introduction to Drupal.
No, this is not a mistake... in our ecumenical web design effort to be open and honest to all of the open source universe; we do sincerely promote this great CMS... but coud it really be better than Joomla!
Joomla! took it the first year in 2006, but over the past 4 years... Drupal is on top...
Much of our discussion of late has been around the availability of something novel for Joomla! users, a content construction kit. Well, Drupal has had this for years and it works really well.
So if you want an award winning CMS with a really great CCK, look no further than Drupal. Unless of course, you get stuck with the tech and just want all the immediate flexibility of Joomla!
But who knows, maybe we will all be using wordpress before the day is done... they won last year!
One of the big draws for me to Joomla! initially was the community support. I did not feel alone when I was jumping in. Joomla! was actually introduced to me by a coworker before it forked from mambo.
Mambo has not had a news post on its site since 2008, well that is what you get for trying to jump ship on open source.
Drupal is a great open source CMS and it is so because of a community that supports it as well as the Joomla! community. When I meet folks like Alex Fisher, I know that their expertise and decisions are not in vain... and the choice to go with Drupal makes a lot of sense.
If you want to jump into Drupal, there is a user group right around the corner, with experts like Alex waiting to help you take the next step. For all of us trying to wrangle the octopus of web design, this is invaluable. Sure you could read his blog , but here you get to ask him a question in person.
The Joomla Project announces the immediate availability of Joomla
1.5.20 [senu takaa]. This is a security release that addresses issues
with the Joomla 1.5.19 packages. We recommend users upgrade
immediately.
The Development
Working Group's goal is to continue to provide regular, frequent
updates to the Joomla community.
Zoo 2.0 is out, and now there is a real contender for a usable content creation kit for Joomla! other than K2. Not that K2 is not good or well accepted, its just missing some stuff... like all software. So here is an alternative, Zoo. Nested categories and the ability to place an article in more than one at a time is just the beginning.
The component is available for free, and you just by the add on app configurations for it. Wait for Joomla! 1.6 or go with zoo, now you have another question to answer for that Joomla! project that needs a little something more than what 1.5 offers.
I will be digging into Zoo and intend to demo it at the June meetup.
In the most recent user group session we gave a crash course into K2. We approached K2 by showing some of the current limitations within the traditional Joomla! content creation system and how K2 was designed to fill those needs. Many of the things K2 seeks to address, content structure and ACL, will be addressed in future releases of Joomla! It also puts together a nice package of tools that normally would have to be added on one at a time from multiple vendors.
Better Categorizing options
Extra fields
Commenting
Tagging
User group creation
Content templates
Its all pretty great stuff, and if you need it right now and you want to spend the time to figure out this brand new software that may be rendered obsolete as soon as Joomla! 1.6 arrives (which nobody knows when) then its a good option. Other developers are already starting to notice K2 and create their plugins to work with it, much like the popular community builder extension of yesteryear and its commercial rival jomsocial.
Zoo 2.0 is out, and now there is a real contender for a usable content creation kit for Joomla! other than K2. Not that K2 is not good or well accepted, its just missing some stuff... like all software. So here is an alternative, Zoo. Nested categories and the ability to place an article in more than one at a time is just the beginning.
In the most recent user group session we gave a crash course into K2. We approached K2 by showing some of the current limitations within the traditional Joomla! content creation system and how K2 was designed to fill those needs. Many of the things K2 seeks to address, content structure and ACL, will be addressed in future releases of Joomla! It also puts together a nice package of tools that normally would have to be added on one at a time from multiple vendors.
