General CMS Issues

In this section you can read Alledia blog posts about general Content Management System issues.

Forum and CMS

phpBB3 Integration Can Be The Joomla 1.5 Killer App

Forum and CMSDuring conversations with clients over the last few months, one key question keeps coming up: "should I use Joomla 1.0 or Joomla 1.5?" In fact, I can trace the first time I was asked that question back to October 2006.

Now that 1.5 has officially launched, I tend to point the non-technically minded to 1.0 and those who don’t mind dealing with a few bugs to 1.5.

However, until this week I don’t think I’ve found a compelling reason for anyone to use 1.5 rather than 1.0. That may have changed:

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Drupal Founder Earns $7 Million in VC Funding

AcquiaFinally it looks like we may have an answer to the question I posed last year: can Joomla or Drupal produce a RedHat?

Drupal’s founder Dries Buytaert has launched a new company called Acquia that has picked up $7 million in venture capital funding. (Apparently the new name is meant to refer to “aqua” and Drupal’s original meaning of “drop of water”).

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Drupal Looking for New Revenue Sources

Fascinating to see Drupal considering different ways to raise money for their project. It seems that every successful Open Source project ends up asking the same question: “How can we get the resources to keep growing and improve our standards?”

Some Drupal community members are already raising pertinent questions in the forum so it will fascinating to see how this plays out:

  • Drupal Association membership pricing survey. The Drupal Association is working to set up a membership program. The goal is to design a open, fair, and effective way for individuals and companies to financially support the Drupal community directly and get benefits from the Drupal project in return.
  • Drupal.org advertising proposals requested. In 2006, Drupal.org traffic increased 250%. In order to prepare for future growth of Drupal.org and the needs of the Drupal community the Drupal Association is looking into starting a paid advertising program. We believe that paid advertising that is relevant to the needs of Drupal administrators, Drupal users, and the Drupal community can be placed in relevant sections of Drupal.org and help the Drupal community greatly by funding improvements and infrastructure for Drupal.org websites.
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Archives

4 Reasons Why Archives Should be Archived

ArchivesThe web still has lots of carry-overs from the real-world. Think of the way the names given to so many online items, such as folders, bookmarks, pages and tabs. They comfort people by reminding them of a real-world office.

As people become more comfortable online we can dispense with some key 20th century ideas. Among these, perhaps the most useless of all is the Archive. Back in the day, when we needed row-upon-row of dusty filing cabinets to store the information of a single organization, archives were a neccessary evil.

In the online world, they’re next to useless. Allow me to explain:

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Digg and Open Source

Why Aren’t Open Source Projects on Digg More Often?

Digg and Open SourceJoomlaCode.org was released last week, and it was a major step forward for Joomla.

Despite this good news the story didn’t make it far beyond the Joomla community. Amy Stephen posted on her blog, urging people to vote for it on Digg.com, but the story ended up with 40 votes. That’s about 10% of the votes normally needed to make the Digg frontpage.

That poor showing got me asking a simple question….Why aren’t Open Source projects more sucessfull on social news sites?

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Yellow Pages and Web Design

Yellow Pages – Red Face

Yellow Pages and Web DesignToday saw the end of something that has bugged me for a whole year – our Yellow Pages contract. Wow, that’s an expensive, useless heap of nothing for a webdesign company.

After two years of growing the company, mainly by word-of-mouth, this time last year I decided that we might be able to expand our local customer base by advertising in the Yellow Pages. I was wrong – embarrasingly so. We have had precisely five calls. None of those people were doing anything more than trying to find out general pricing.

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Is Social Networking Right for Your Site?

Five things to consider before adding social networking features to your site, or even more seriously, launching a 100% social networking site:

  1. It is absurdly difficult to monetize even a very successful social networking site. Facebook has a click-through rate on its ads of 0.04%. That means they need 1 million page views to generate 400 clicks. If those clicks bring in 40 cents each, they’re looking at 1 million page views just to earn $100. MySpace has a CTR (click-through rate) of 0.10%, which is equally useless. The problem is that people who spend a lot of time on social sites are either so used to seeing the ads that they don’t notice them any more, or they spend too much time online and don’t make much money. Probably both. Subscriptions rarely work either, because they’re used to getting such services for free. You will need another business model.
  2. Its expensive to monitor. Unfortunately, an honesty policy won’t catch all the spam, inappropriate content and insults flying around on your site. You need to make sure you have the resources to actively monitor activity on your site. Its possible to get involved in court cases because someone said something derogatory about someone else on your site. The New York Times had an article a few months ago about Legacy.com, which employs 45 people just to stop visitors posting nasty things about the dead. Now imagine how many people large websites need to monitor what is said about the living.
  3. The competition is extraordinary. Sit and watch the Mashable.com blog every day for a few weeks. You’ll be shocked by how many sites are launching and competing in the marketplace. Watch for a few months and you’ll start to see news about those same sites closing down or putting themselves up for sale.
  4. Its a moving target. Getting into the game requires a constant investment in technology to keep people interested and generate repeat visitors. The move from printed books to photography and then TV and mobile phones took 500 years. On the net a similar shift took just 8 years, as this image from Mashable makes clear. If you do start a social site, you may find yourself on a hamster wheel of development.
  5. It creates a lot of low value, junk pages that can hurt your SEO. When was the last time you ran into a MySpace page while searching on Google? If you do want to add social features it might be worth putting them into a subdomain where they can do less damage to your rankings.
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How Long Should a Website Take to Build?

I met with a client a couple of weeks ago who admitted that his knowledge of the internet was more or less zero, yet he managed to make me rethink the way we handle a lot of our website projects.

Now this guy is a Baby Boomer and has spent most of his life dealing with patients in his health practice and very, very little on the computer. He asked me to come in for a meeting and after a while I agreed that we’d build a website for his company.

We started to discuss the specifics of the agreement and had no problems fixing on a price and a design. He asked me how long it would take to complete the project.

"About a month", I answered.

His simple answer was "Why?". He went on, "If I can see a patient whose case is new to me, treat them and get them out of the door inside of an hour, why do webdesigners need a month to get their job done?"

Now, granted, he didn’t have the best view of webdesigners (the last one he’d contracted with had promised delivery in two months and hadn’t provided it within four months, which is why he came to us), but he had a point. Back when I started building websites, it really did take a month or more to build the design, copy the HTML template over to each new page and then to go back and forth with the client until the design was fixed. After all, once the website was complete, it would be a pain in the rear to make any changes. But now with Joomla, should I really be using a month as the default timeframe for a relatively straightforward site?

Simply – no. Theres no reason why Alledia can’t turn around a Joomla website inside of two weeks. And thats what we agreed on with the guy. We worked a little overtime and put off some in-house projects for a week or two, but we got the site done in ten days and found a new way of working.

We’ve done two more projects in the same way since and will probably keep doing it. Turning around projects in two weeks rather than one or two months means that:

  1. The client is more focused. Documents needed for the site materialise rapidly when the deadline is only a day or two away.
  2. We’re more focused. Like it or not, a deadline atmosphere is productive.
  3. We’re more profitable. We turn over more projects
  4. Our prices are cheaper. With a loose or far-away deadline, past clients often wanted to "try things out" and then put them back the way they were, or spend hours on a small issue, increasing the cost of the site. That can still happen, but now clients often prefer to launch and then wait for feedback from the clients and business partners who offer more practical ways to improve the site.

Has the quality of our sites suffered by working faster? I don’t believe so. After only three sites its not easy to tell, but we’ve spent the same number of hours on 2-week sites as we did on 2-month sites and we went through the same number of mock-up and revision phases. Simply, I’m now less inclined to believe that the umming and aaahing that goes on during the webdesign process helps more than does increasing a company’s speed-to-market.

Obviously there will still be plenty of large and complex projects that will need many weeks, and sometimes our schedule may not allow for such rapid completion, but in general projects that come to us requiring a template and off-the-shelf Joomla components will be complete within fourteen days, if thats what the client wants.

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Open Source Projects Not Really Open?

(After reading this post, please scroll down to the comments section where there is a response to these issues from the founder of Moodle.)

Over the last few weeks a debate has been running over at the Joomla forum about how to license the Joomla name and logo for websites supporting the Joomla project. The discussion wound up with the following point from Johan Janssens, the lead developer:

If you wish to use the logo on any commercial product then your usage of the logo must be approved. In general permission will be given providing that your usage of the logo is not done in such a way as to imply any form of approval of the product by Joomla!

We’ve had an interesting insight into the licensing of Open Source names and logos.

During 2006 we had a lot of fun creating and running JoomlaYellowPages.com and DrupalYellowPages.com, and more recently, OSCYellowPages.com for OS Commerce developers. We believe that all three sites are positive for their different open source communities and we had no problem at all using the names and logos of the three projects in our branding and design work.

After successfully completing three launches, we moved on to Moodle. MoodleYellowPages.com was greated with a series of stern warnings. Despite being branded as an Open Source project, it is in fact illegal for an company to offer Moodle services unless they have been approved by a man named Martin Dougiamas in Perth, Australia. He alone controls trademarks over both the Moodle name and logo. The official position is that:

“The word Moodle is a legally registered trade mark, and can not be used to promote Moodle services without permission.

If you are not offering Moodle services (such as hosting, consulting, installation etc) then, yes, you can use the logo (we encourage it!).

However if you are promoting commercial Moodle services then you need to seek permission from us, via this Moodle Helpdesk, as the Moodle logo contains the Moodle trademark.”

Basically, you cannot run a Moodle business without Martin’s on-going approval.

Within a few days of opening, MoodleYellowPages.com we started to receive emails from developers interested in learning more about Joomla and its LMS systems, because they had been shut out of the commercial Moodle world.

Reluctantly, we shut down that site and started to consider alternatives. The next on our list was OpenCms. It turns out that:

The OpenCms logo is a registered trademark of Alkacon Software GmbH in Germany, the USA and many other countries.

Like Moodle, they also have an officially approved list of developers and if you want to use the logo:

Permission is granted to use the OpenCms logo in unmodified form on your website for promoting the official OpenCms software available form the opencms.org website only.

We emailed Alkacon, but they never responded.

To be on the safe side, I decided not to include any of their logos in this article. Come to that, maybe I should replace OpenCMS and Moodle with XXXXXXX and XXXXXX.

Basically these projects are suffering from the same, serious problem that caused Joomla to break away from Mambo. An Open Source project can meet the technical definitions of “Open Source” while remaining, in reality, the fiefdom of one small company or even one person. Joomla and Drupal are not perfect, but we’re certainly not moving to Moodle or OpenCms anytime soon.

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A Very Happy 6th Birthday and Version 5.0 to Drupal

There’s been a very gratifying exchange of support and kinds words between the Drupal and Joomla communities during the last few days.

 

It started with the announcement of the release of Drupal 5.0 on Drupal’s 6th birthday. That news made  a big splash, reaching the frontpage of Digg and several other technology news sites.

 

The Joomla developers responded with a big "Congratulations!",  a response that was greated warmly at the Drupal forums.

 

In that same spirit, we offer a brief comparison, showing that Drupal and Joomla have a lot more in common than may people realise:

 

{moschart id=9}

 

Theres an even a website online dedicated to teaching kids about the special relationship between the Netherlands and Australia

 

In all serious, we wish to add our congratulations to those already received by the Drupal community. We hope Drupal and Joomla communities will continue to learn from each other and grow. Its clear to see that this is happening in the latest versions of both:

 

  • With 5.0, Drupal goes along way to emulating Joomla’s sucess in being user-friendly. It now has a web-based installer and an administration panel clearly separate from the site’s menus. This release of 5.0 alone has generated almost twice as much traffic as Drupal.org has ever had before.
  • With 1.5, Joomla goes along way to improving its framework and catching up with Drupal in terms of producing compliant, developer-friendly code.

 

 

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