Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

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VIP-Quotes


15 Jan

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Posted in Reviews | No Comments »

I found a very simple Quote system for Joomla that shows some promise, and with a little change might end up being the perfect solution for my term. project.

I’ve attached my quick guide of how to install it, and configure it. It goes very quickly, and provides a few things that are nice.  In its presence stage, the random quote module seems to be the best use for it.  It installs easily, but lacks a few features such as sorting by categories and direct linking. But take a peak at the quick install guide and let me know what you think.

VIpQuotes

Joomla! vs Drupal


13 Jan

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Posted in Reviews, School | 1 Comment »

Today in CMS Class we moved away from our Joomla! discussion and took a peak at Drupal.  Drupal is a very powerful CMS system.  While I have used Drupal before for class work, it is always interesting to go back and take a second and third look at systems to see how their features actually work.

After spending more time with Joomla, I have found a few things with Joomla that I prefer over Drupal.  Joomla’s administrator access is a completely different backend, and even a separate login system.  Drupal’s system for administrating works, but how you float back and forth from the front end to the back end of the site is weird to me.  I’m sure I would get used to it over time, however at the time being, I prefer having them be separate.  Perhaps it is a false sense of security, but by keeping everything separate and hidden it seems more secure to me.

Drupal does have a few more pieces of a site that I like that are built in, such as the forum feature.  The reason that I like this better than Joomla, is that by being in the core functions, it’s more likely to get updated and be kept up-to-date.  With Joomla, most plugins are written by 3rd parties, which this is true of Drupal, because more core features are included with Drupal. It’s likely to be more secure than adding in more plugins.

Overall, I think that for most people, Joomla will be a better option than Drupal for ease of use, and configuration.   I’m open to suggestions and am curious as to what others have thought about Drupal and or Joomla and other CMS systems that they have played with.

If you are curious as to how the CMS systems work, but don’t have a working install, It would be worth checking out http://php.opensourcecms.com/ you can play with most Open CMS systems for free and usually a fast option to play before you install.

Text Rental and Chegg


07 Jan

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Posted in Raves, Reviews | 3 Comments »

A friend was asking me about our text rental system at UWSP the other day, and started asking me questions about chegg, so I thought I’d take time and share a great experience that i had with them

I am blessed to attend a school that provides text rental as part of our tuition, which means that we have very few books that we have to purchase, as most of them are provided in form of rental, for free. Well, somewhat free, it’s included in the weird fees that they charge us, but that’s another story.  The main benefit to these rentals is that it saves us money, but also the environment.

Well, what if you attend a school that doesn’t provide text rental, or that you want to just read a book that your local library doesn’t have?  The solution came to me last year when I needed to buy a book that was quite expensive and I only needed it for a few weeks of a class.  The answer is Chegg.

Chegg is the online version of my local text rental system.  You look for the books that you need, and odds are the book is in their system.  It tells you the price to rent the book for different lengths of times, ranging from a few weeks to a few months.  The books ship promptly, either from chegg’s offices, or from the publisher or Amazon if it’s a newer book.  In my case, the book arrived two days after I ordered it, directly from Amazon.  The system is also great, because for each book that is rented, they plant a tree to help restock the rain forests.

When you are done with the books, you log back into Chegg’s system and tell them that you want to return the book, and they provide you with a shipping label that is prepaid, and you drop it off at a shipping point. Boom. You are done and don’t get charged anything more than the rental charge.

But what happens if I don’t like the book or it’s the wrong one? Chegg offers a 30 day no questions return policy where you get your entire rental price back.

The system honestly is one of the coolest and quickest options for a text or book rental system.  If you do have books that you no longer want that you have purchased, you can sell them to Chegg, which is a cool option.  They take into factors things such as how many classes might be using this book, the update frequencies and stuff like that, but still, it’s a cool system to take a peek at.

Do something green for the environment and that is also easy on the wallet, and check out this cool system for any books that you need for the upcoming terms.

CMS Revisited


06 Jan

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Posted in Reviews | 3 Comments »

To help compare with the other CMS systems, Professor Krause was kind enough to group together all of our files, normalize them and produce an updated matrix of how we feel as a class the main CMS systems did.   We did normalize a few of our results, mostly for the workflow control, and performance and scalability.   I still stand by our research from playing with it, both on a local install and the demo account on exPublish’s webpage that it is more sluggish than the others, but to each their own.

Click for a Larger View

From looking at the other groups results, it appears that one to take a peak at and play with would be Plone. However, since its written mostly in Python vs PHP there would be more of a learning curve at the start.

Its important to note, that not one single CMS is going to be perfect for everyone, and studying your needs and what you actually want to accomplish is important.  I’d recommend starting with a blank sheet of paper and writing the main aspects and features you want on your site. (If it’s new, start small and work your way up, most CMS’s features are scalable).

The global scale of CMS’s typically does put Joomla, Drupal and WordPress in the top three choices that are used as CMS.

CMS, What is it good for?


06 Jan

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Posted in Rants, Reviews | 2 Comments »

My winter class this year (WDMD 346) is on Content Management Systems (CMS).  What is a CMS you ask?  It is a system for taking the everyday tasks of managing a website and simplifying it into something that is more manageable for more users.   They are able to dynamically (create on the fly) create pages with content that you provide.  The main benefit is that you can have a static template file, and the content changes for every page, but you only have to update the template file once and it is applied globally to all files on the site that use the said template.

A vast range of CMS’s have existed for a long time, but a few have stood the test of time, and have proven to be more useful.   I have used a few CMS’s over time, mostly for blogging.  The CMS’s that I have used are GreyMatter, MovableType, WordPress (This site), Drupal, Joomla and phpnuke.

Because most of the sites that I manage are mostly static content, and a few blogs, the blogging suite of CMS’s have gotten more of my focus.  From my class work, I’ve used Drupal and Joomla.  Both are very powerful, but have more of a learning curve than I have had the time for.  Today in class, we took the time to compare a few CMS systems to another.   The new CMS that my group and I played with was ezPublish, which is known as the “The Content Management Ecosystem”.

Our first thoughts of the sites that were produced with ezPublish were that they looked nice, and had a professional feel to them.  However this is mostly just the templates that were used.  From exploring the administrative options and the backend of the sites, we started to become less and less impressed as time went on.  The Demo sites, including one that we locally installed, were sluggish, and the interface was just clunky.   Our task was to evaluate the CMS on a range of features and compare them to Joomla, Drupal and WordPress.

CMS Matrix

Click for a Larger view

(I’ll try to post an update with all of the CMS’s that the entire class looked it)

While the above picture shows our results, one thing to note, is that ezPublish seems to focus itself on the ecommerce side of things, and not as much of the pure content systems that the others do.  EzPublish works more as a media server, and Enterprise CMS system for intranets.  While the other systems can be used in these environments, this looks to be the area that ezPublish shines.

I still plan on sticking with WordPress for my blogging needs, as its interface and plug-ins associated with it, tend to work the best and the quickest.   For my other sites that aren’t a blog, I think that Drupal or Joomla might end up being a better choice. The scalability of adding more features with Joomla and Drupal seem to really catch my interest, and is something to keep looking into as time goes on.

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Corey's Rants

A Web Developer's rants, raves and randomness.