In Search of Free Web Hosting
It been awhile since I last wrote, but something got me wondering. What if you want to start with a self-hosted Wordpress blog, but at the same time don't want to spend a dime on web hosting. Are there viable offers out there? Or is it mission impossible?
In the weeks ahead I'll try to find a couple of good free web hosts that are good enough (PHP, MySQL) to host a Wordpress blog. Let's see if I can come up with something.
CMSMS hosting
Quantumrealms.com is based on CMS Made Simple, a lightweight, yet powerful, yet easily manageable CMS. Since the very dawn of QuantumRealms I've been searching for a web host that actually supports CMSMS hosting.
Today I found it - Arvixe. QuantumRealms is not affiliated with it in any way, this is a mere recommendation for those still looking for the best web hosting.
Visit their website to find out more: http://www.arvixe.com.
Open Source CMS Market Share Report 2010 released
The digital agency water&stone released it's newest white paper called 2010 Open Source CMS Market Share Report. The report analyses 20 top content management systems including Alfresco WCM, CMSMadeSimple, Concrete5, DotNetNuke, Drupal, e107, eZ Publish, Joomla!, Liferay, MODx, Movable Type, OpenCMS, Plone, SilverStripe, Textpattern, Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware, Typo3, Umbraco, WordPress and Xoops, focusing primarly on brand strength and market share.
The paper concludes that the big three - WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal - are still uncontested when it comes to brand strength and market share. Particularly WordPress has had a strong year and has now taken a lead in brand strength.
It is suggested that the next big thing might be either Concrete5 or Umbraco.
The water&stone whitepaper can be downloaded here: http://www.waterandstone.com/sites/default/files/2010%20OSCMS%20Report.pdf
PacktPub Open Source Awards 2010
PacktPub recently announced the winners of their annual Open Source Awards. As it reads on their homepage, "the Open Source Awards is a contest that aims to encourage, support, recognize and reward Open Source projects". People were able to nominate applications in the following categories (amongst others): Open Source CMS, Hall of Fame CMS and Most Promising Open Source Project.
The winners are listed below:
Open Source CMS - CMS Made Simple
Hall of Fame CMS - Wordpress
Most Promising Open Source Project - Pimcore
CMSMS 1.9 released
The development team behind CMSMS announced the release of CMS Made Simple 1.9. Although the last release was 1.8.3, major new features made it to the new release. The most important ones in my opinion are as follows:
- fully customizable URLs
- the News Module now also supports fully customizable URLs
- major MenuManager performance increase
- jQuery support
Considering that the work on CMSMS 2.0 has taken already 2 years and is still ongoing, this release got a very warm welcome from the user base.
Online Joomla template editor
Template-Builder.com makes it possible - now you can edit your Joomla templates online. You can now manage, store and edit your templates online, wherever you are.
The editor itself looks like a typical WYSIWYG editor. You just need to click on the element you want to modify and a set of options appears on the left toolbar. It's pretty straightforward.
No install or download is needed as the template editor is a web application. Excellent export options make this worth a try.
Choosing the right CMS
What CMS should I use? This is a question I have asked myself many times, as I maintain several other websites besides QuantumRealms. I'm sure many of you have been puzzled by this question, too. There are so many solutions available that it makes one dizzy. How do you find the best solution for you? My suggestion: make a list!
1. What is the nature of your website?
If you are about to start a personal blog, you might find that Wordpress is the CMS for you. If, on the other hand, you plan to build a big community site, you might want to consider something more powerful like Joomla.
2. How big will your site be?
Are 10 pages enough, or will you need to publish 10.000+ pages?
3. Customization, user feedback and multiple content editors.
Would you like to customize the look and feel of your website or are would you be satisfied with the default design? Do you want to get feedback from your users? Are multiple editors going to update/write content?
If you answered all those questions, you already have a pretty good idea what you need. Check out Smashing Magazine and Webdesigner Depot for more in-depth information about the topic.
How to add a blog in CMSMS
Step-by-step instructions how to install the blogging module CGBlog in CMS Made Simple
Step 1: Install CGExtensions and CGSimpleSmarty
CGBlog requires CGExtensions and CGSimpleSmarty in order to function properly. So we cannot proceed without this.
Step 2: Install CGBlog
Now that the dependencies are in place, navigate again to the Module Manager and install CGBlog. A new selection under Content should appear - Calguys Blog Module.
Step 3 (optional): Adjust the settings
Let's click on the Options tab. We get a lot of options that we can customize to fit our needs. I personally changed the Prefix to use on all URLS from the blog module option from cgblog to blog. We can change the settings at any time.
Step 4 (optional): Adjust the templates
The best thing I like about CMSMS is that we are able to customize the layout and design of everything. We can change the summary and detail templates as we see fit.
Step 5: Write first post
There is a Add Blog Entry link under the Entries tab. You need to assign a title, write the content and click Submit.
Step 6: Add {CGBlog} tag
To display the blog entries, you need to add the {CGBlog} tag into the content of a page or into a page template.
That's it. It's as simple as that.
Hello World
This is the first post in our newly installed blog. Hello World!
After the idea to add a blog was initially announced more than a week ago. I finally found the time to actually get it done. The installation itself took just under 5 minutes and was as simple as one would expect from CMSMS. After all, thatswhy it's called CMS Made Simple, right?
The thing I like the most about CMSMS is that I have total control over the layout and design of every element. This is no different this time. I can quickly edit the summary template and post details template and fit them to my needs. It's simple and effective. Just the way I like it.
