Yet another great post from Smashing Magazine, this time Glen Stansberry wrote post reviewing of 10 Weblog Engines among them WordPress, Drupal and Joomla!
Af course they included MovableType and ExpressionEngine which I also tried but didn’t like that much.
Looking and writing about the following aspects of each engine:
- Programming language.
- What features you’ll need.
- The size of the software’s community.
- The age of the software.
- If you are planning on extending the Blog.
For Programming language my favorite is PHP, Like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla! (and Typo3)
Features are within the core or easily integrated with Extensions like Components, Plugins and/or Modules.
Both these Blogging platforms have very good community to support you, although Joomla! is the biggest at this moment.
Age for me is really not much of an issue but for you looking at the first release dates…
WordPress started in 2003, Drupal in 2001 and Joomla! in 2005 as a fork from Mambo that was build from 2000 (Open source Dual license in 2001)
Extending your "Blog" is really easy with all the packages I favor.
Focus on Blogging
But when it comes to Blogging, WordPress works best for me and in the Smashing magazine post Glen wrote one simple statement under Drupal and extend it later on to Joomla!
"it’s not just blogging software. Drupal is community software. "
Which is exactly how I see it…
You can use Joomla! for Blogging and with Drupal you can do the same thing, but I just don’t like the Drupal control panel that much to write blogposts.
One other great article comparing Drupal and Joomla mentioned in the post is from Steve (Hope you get a lot of traffic from this Smashing magazine article!) over at Alledia on Joomla and Drupal.(Needs an Update since the release of Joomla 1,5 ;-)
All in all, a nice overview of the Blogging Engine landscape of today from Smashing Magazines, and for me its good to see that Joomla now is also considered a Blogging Platform although still with some limitations.
But those limitations can be overcome with the right setting and Blogging Components for Joomla.
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Tags: Blogging · Drupal · Joomla · WordPress
Joomla just released version 1.5.6. of its Open Source CMS.
This release is an security fix that fixes a leak that "will allow an unauthenticated, unauthorized user to reset the password of the first enabled user (lowest id)".
So if you run a Joomla 1.5.x website, make sure you update soon! asap would be fine :-)
For the rest, you can read that even a seasoned Joomla administrator sometimes forget to put a basic security practice in place.
Here are some tips to make your Joomla site just a little safer:
- create some new users after installation and give one of them super-administrative rights, make sure you know the user-name and password to login.
Then Login under this user-name and delete the first user called Admin.
- Set your configuration.php file permissions to 644, or even 604 to prevent php injections and overwriting your configuration.php. Do the same with your index.php file.
- Make sure your administration directory is secured by .htaccess and password, the easiest way you can realize this is mostly done by the cpanel of your hosting company.
Otherwise there is a good tutorial on Joomla Add-ons
- Make a proper backup of your website after your last changes or at least on a weekly base.
Also have a copy of your configuration.php and index.php files on your local PC.
From an SEO point of view a hacked website can get you into trouble because Google will take you out of the Index (may take some days, depending on your crawl frequency) and you have to do a re-inclusion request once the site is backup again.
If you want to keep an eye on your website, use a program like http://mon.itor.us/ or the one I use Site24×7, both can send you an warning email if something goes wrong.
And both will give you the possibility of a free account and don’t overcharge for their service.
Tags: Joomla
My Google Alert on Joomla SEO just brought me this link to an Google Insights Article that also discussed the use of this new tool in conjunction with the previous mentioned report in Open Source CMS Market shares.
What interested me even more was how these figures where on a regional level, so I did some comparisons between Worldwide, USA, UK and the Netherlands.
The outcome did somehow surprise me…
Below the graphics for the Worldwide search, showing clearly the search for Joomla as the biggest one…
Now for the Dutch searchers, Joomla is also looking great with extreem high search levels.
When it comes to the UK, you see that Joomla and WordPress are almost level, with WordPress here as the rising star.
But here is the really BIG surprise, Joomla is loosing big time to WordPress when it comes to the United States.
So where does this big difference come from? Are there more Bloggers in the US?
Is WordPress so much more popular in the US for use as a CMS as well?
Is the installed base of WordPress bigger in the US, and are there more questions on using WordPress?
But that is just one way to look at this tool….
Most interesting are the screens just below the Worldwide search, that will show you the regions that are the biggest searchers on that specific keyword.
Which is great information if you need to target a certain region for your SEO Customer.
Also the results below that field, which gives you related searches, but also Rising searches… which means that this is a tool to use in the future to see what keywords are hot and what you should be writing about!
I like the tool! How about you? can you work with this information or are you skeptical about the numbers shown?
Tags: SEO · Search Engine
Today I read a Report from Water & Stone, a big name in the Mambo community as one of there Templates is a great looking one with a lot of installations.
The report (which you can download here) brings numbers and conclusions on Market shares of Open Source CMS like Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress and many others like e107,Typo3, Modx, Elgg en more…
In the report there are clearly three Big names in Open Source CMS, not that we did not know who the leaders are, but Rik Shreves does a great job by bringing in the numbers to proof it!
What is strange to me was that Twitter users tend to write more on WordPress and Drupal than on Joomla!, Where are the Joomla Twitters?
I also like the Search Engine Ranking research on page 17, on which Joomla! and Drupal score big time, but WordPress is nowhere in sight for the search terms that contain CMS.
Clearly WordPress is still mostly seen as an Blogging platform instead of a Content Management System like Joomla and Drupal.
In the conclusion pages of the report there is also a section about the future of some projects like Mambo en CMSMadeSimple as well upcoming systems like Elgg and Modx.
Get the download and read the report, it is well written with lots of graphs and gives an insight of what the market in Open Source CMS is right now!
Tags: Joomla
