In The Series
So, when we left off in part two, I was leaning towards Wordpress as a candidate for a CMS. It’s popular, has tons of themes, plugins, etc. It’s almost perfect, but for only certain situations.
Enter Drupal
Now, I’ve been hearing a lot about Drupal. For years now. I tried it once and I didn’t like it. However, since then, I’ve revisited it. And I’m happy I did.
I must admit, it had a lot to do with president Obama winning the election. The redesign of Whitehouse.gov was an eye opener. So I thought, if it’s good enough for the president, maybe I should give this thing a second look.
Drupal Pros – Reminds Me Of Wordpress
- Popularity – Again, like Wordpress, a popular CMS is going to have an advantage over most newcomers because of support and community contributions.
- Modules – There are a lot of modules out there that will do most of what your mind can imagine out of the box.
Posted in General.
Tagged with cms, drupal, PHP, wordpress.
By Kevin Lloyd
– December 25, 2009
In The Series
I made some promises in Part 1 that I was reminded about in Part 2 (Thanks Ian). I didn’t give Wordpress enough attention. So, here I go.
Wordpress As A CMS has pretty much become a household phrase these days. So, let’s just right in.
Why I Love Wordpress
- Popularity – It’s arguably the most popular blogging platform out there. Popularity means a huge community, active development and lots of community contribution (plugins and themes anyone?)
- Posts and Pages – Wordpress does this extremely well. That’s what it’s made for.
- Plugins – There are thousands of plugins that extend this tool and makes life a breeze for a lot of us.
- Themes – Again, another benefit of popularity is that there are tons of themes out there to pick from and build upon. Every project doesn’t have to start from a blank slate.
Wordpress is excellent at what it does. It’s also good at some of the things it wasn’t designed to do. You have a lot of things to work with in Wordpress: Posts, pages, categories, tags, widgets, and even the dreaded custom fields.
Posted in General.
By Kevin Lloyd
– December 1, 2009
In The Series
On the quest for the perfect CMS (Picking a CMS Part 1), I’ve decided to switch focus a little bit.
New Standards
As you guys can see, I’ve had way too much on my hands to do a thorough job on the quest for the perfect Content Management System. But then something came to mind. Aren’t we all busy? No matter how wondering or beautiful a CMS is; it’s not use if all that beauty is buried so deep that people can’t find it. If you have to dig more than three (3) pages down on a Google Search page, then it’s not good enough.
Popularity – Just Like In High School
I know, I know, it isn’t fair, but that’s how life is. The popular guys got the girls, they made the football team, and they drive better cars. That’s just how life is. If a CMS is popular enough, it’s going to have certain things going for it.
Posted in General, Joomla, Reader Input.
Tagged with cms, wordpress.
By Kevin Lloyd
– November 25, 2009
In The Series
Define The Problem
In the past, I’ve done some freelance Web Development and Web Design for different clients. One question I’ve always had to ask myself is:
How will the user be updating this website?
That question is usually preempted by a question to the client:
Do you have any HTML experience?
I can count (on one hand) the number of times that I’ve heard a yes to this question. To be quite honest, I don’t even know why I ask it anymore. Hardly any of my clients ever had HTML experience and even if they did, I doubt they’d want to go through the hassle. So this poses the very interesting question How do you pick a CMS (content management system) for a web project?
What Not To Do – Pure HTML is wrong for many reasons
Over the years, I’ve had much experience in this area (what not to do). Gone are the days when people simply wanted a web presence. Those days, things were simple. You fire up your copy of Frontpage (oh how we’ve learned from then) and designed a website for a client and stick it onto an FTP server, and viola; you’re done. Worst case scenario, they call you up seven (7) months later and say they’ve changed their phone number and need you to make an update.
Posted in Blog, CakePHP, PHP, Reader Input.
Tagged with CakePHP, cms.
By Kevin Lloyd
– May 20, 2009
What Does IE 8 Mean To Developers?
Personally, I’m ecstatic that Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 8. The great part is that they’ve stuck it in the Windows Automatic Updates and they’ve already started rolling it out Windows users. I damn near threw a party to celebrate.
Of course, we won’t be seeing the real benefits for a while (maybe for a few years, even), but the point is, the process has begun. Does this mean we can say goodbye to IE 6, CSS hacks, and IE conditional tags? Well, of course not! It’s never that easy when it comes to Windows or Microsoft. But again, the process has begun.
Am I saying that there are no problems with the other browsers? No I’m not. Try to find an old copy of Firefox 1.5 and load up a current website. It’s going to look very ugly. The point is, Firefox (I’m not sure about the other browsers) has long ago implemented automatic updates to their products. Old versions, simply disappear.
You Just Can’t Make People Happy
For years, Microsoft has been getting flack about old versions of Internet Explorer. The irony is that, now they’ve finally done something about it, but not everyone is happy.
Posted in General.
Tagged with ie, internet explorer.
By Kevin Lloyd
– May 11, 2009
I’m sure you guys have heard about Git. It’s been making a lot of waves lately. It seems that I’m always the last to jump on the bandwagon when it comes to things like that, but I’m finally here.
Introduction
There are tons of Version Control Systems (VCS) out there: Source Safe (Microsoft’s Baby, which sucks by the way), CVS, and SVN. Git is different from those in one major way: It’s a distributed system as opposed to a centralized one. That means, there is no central repository that users check out revisions from. There can be a central one, but it’s not a requirement. Every use has a complete copy of the entire repository on his system at any one time.
I’m only (intimately) familiar with SVN. So you can read more on the differences between Git and SVN. They range from faster processing, due to the fact that everything is local; to reduced disk space usage by Git.
Posted in General, Linux, Work.
Tagged with git, tutorial.
By Kevin Lloyd
– May 9, 2009
Welcome to the December 26, 2008 edition of Web Development 2.0. (Yeah, I know I’m a bit late, but it was Christmas 
)
Fiona King presents 10 Best Ruby/RoR Web Hosts Compared ? 2009 posted at WHDb.
general
Marcus Hochstadt presents Using A CMS For A Content-Rich Website posted at Marcus Hochstadt, saying, “Marcus describes how he migrated one of his static HTML sites into a Content Management System. Which platform did he choose and why?”
javascript
Jason Maletsky presents Show Partial Content, Slide Animate with jQuery posted at Website Builders Resource, saying, “This plugin will show a partial amount of content from a and allow the user to click a link from the title or a link at the bottom to view the rest of the content with a sliding action.”
That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Web Development 2.0 using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.
Technorati tags: web development 2.0, blog carnival.
Posted in Carnival, General.
By Kevin Lloyd
– January 10, 2009
Comment Relish Plugin + High CPU Usage – Fixed The Right Way
How The Problem Started
Christmas Eve have just started at about 12:03 AM, when I logged on and saw that dreaded message:
So I did what all normal people do at first: I ignored it. Actually, I had a very good reason to at the time. Since it was 12:03 AM, I assumed that my nightly backup job (backup and compress files and databases) was causing the issue.
So after it happened the next day (a few times) I decided to do some investigation.
The Culprit – Comment Relish
HostMonster does a good job of providing some helpful information that you can use to figure out these issues. I went to the directory: cpu_exceeded_logs and sure enough there was a file with today’s (and yesterday’s) date in there. I opened it up and so a ton of referrences to comments on a Wordpress Blog:
That narrowed things down a little bit. The other helpful directory was mysql_slow_queries. Here I found the following query over and over again:
[code='sql']
SELECT c.*, p.*
FROM wp__comments c
INNER JOIN wp__posts p ON p.ID = c.comment_post_ID
LEFT JOIN wp__cr_emailed e ON e.email = c.comment_author_email
WHERE e.email IS NULL AND c.comment_approved = '1'
[/code]
Posted in MySQL, PHP.
Tagged with Blog, comment, database, MySQL, PHP, wordpress.
7 comments
By Kevin Lloyd – December 29, 2008