Learning more about CMS's, webhosting, server administration and search engine optimization in general. Written for personal purposes only.
WYSIWYG Editors - Drupal
WYSIWYG Editor
WYSIWYG stands for What You See Is What You Get, a pretty simple acronym to remember. WYSYWYG editors are used for simple management of HTML code and formatting options when writing blog posts or even publishing websites. Some famous examples of WYSIWYG programs that made websites was Dreamweaver and the online service GeoCities, GeoCities died earlier this year and Dreamweaver is pretty much living dead. Other types of WYSIWYG editors are based on javascript that can be implemented in different CMS like Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla. These are the more common ones and the more popular ones in this category is: TinyMCE and FCKeditor.
FCKeditor or TinyMCE?
I myself use TinyMCE everytime because of it's simplicity and good looks. It has a smoother feeling than FCKeditor. Though FCKedtor has some nice features when playing with HTML and code in general TinyMCE has all the functions you need when you are publishing content on a site.
In terms of reliability I find that they both has some issues, but most of the time they work as they should.
Using the WYSIWYG module for Drupal
Before the WYSIWYG module came out for Drupal you had to install TinyMCE or FCKeditor as separate modules. A nice contribution to the CMS i think, because it simplifies the whole process of choosing one editor that you like.
- Download and install the WYSIWYG module
- Download you favourite editor
- Extract the files from you favourite editor into /sites/all/libraries/[editorname] so that for example fckeditor.js can be found under /sites/all/libraries/fckeditor/fckeditor.js
- Configure the WYSIWYG module profiles and choose the one editor you installed and you're done!
Configuring TinyMCE in LifeType
Since there's no way you can administer TinyMCE in LifeType, you'll have to go and fix your settings in TinyMCE folder and a file called tiny_mce-plog.js. There you can delete some lines of code and choose what features you should offer your users and so forth. I removed all unneccessary functions and moved them all to one line. It looks more nicer and makes it more user friendly.
LifeType - First Impressions
Introduction
LifeType is a open source blogging platform. It has been around since 2003 but have never really cought any attention because of the bigger more dominant blogging platforms like Wordpress and Blogger. It is mostly used as a private blog platform kind of CMS that has all you could ever wish for when you are looking for a pretty standard blog tool.
However, Lifetype cought my attention now recently when I was in search for another CMS that offered multi-user support and the ability for users to register and create an own blog on a subdomain. I'm tired of Wordpress in general so Wordpress MU was out of the question.
First Impression
It took some time and a installation or two to really figure out how LifeType worked. The installation process is very easy. The biggest problem as I saw it was that when the installation is finished. You have basically no idea what to do next. Things like settigns and configurations are spread out across different submenus, there is no real thread or simplicity like in Wordpress MU. Directly after the installation you're provided with a default blog. This will become your homepage. But if your trying to build a multi-user system like me, there's no use of that default blog. It doesn't even provide you with a register link!
The tricky part I had to learn was that there was a page called summary.php. This should be you homepage, it has it all; recent posts, new blogs, active blogs, register link and login form. You can of course set this to with a simple line in your .htaccess.
Things like this makes it a little bit harder to learn, because there's no real documention either.
Setting Up Your Multi-User Site
Turning LifeType into a multi-user platform can be done by first enabling other users to create accounts. This can be done by flipping the switch under Administration > Global Settings > Summary. Users can now register, but be sure to allow them to create blogs so check the permissions for regular users to see if they can create blogs.
One important thing is to enable the creation of subdomains. This can be done by setting a wildcard DNS on your domain. I wont go into that more here, but just do that and check that you have set up your settings so users can create subdomains in your configuration settings.
There's a lot of options to consider depending on how you want your site, but some things I recommend is to fix the URLs by choosing Custom URLs under Global Settings > URLs and then fixing the permalink setting to look more appealing.
Templating And Default Templates
LifeType hasn't got the biggest community out there and you can notice by comparing the templates made for LifeType compared to Wordpress, maybe that's a bit unfair. But anyway you should expect to work a lot with hacking the default templates from LifeType.
Support
I encountered some errors while working with my blogsite, most of them could be found by searching the LifeType Support Forums or Google.
Conclusion
LifeType is a very lightweight blogplatform that can be very effecient when yo have learned to handle it. My final result can be found on Blogg.asia when I'm finished with it.
Introduction to Joomla
Introduction to Joomla
Joomla is one of the biggest CMSes out there, it has a large fanbase with developers building lots of components, plugins and themes for its users. One of the main advantages of Joomla is that it is very easy to install and use. But this is no unique thing, for this is what all big CMSes are built with in mind from the beginning.
Though there are some really good things about Joomla that you can't find in Drupal or Wordpress. The ability to build and implement a good and useful Social Network or Community are a lot easier and less painful than in any other big CMS. I have tried to build communities with Drupal before and I can say from my experience that you can't build a good Community without any knowledge about programming. You can implement basic functions but they will never become what you had in your mind. Compared to Joomla, Drupal is very crude and ugly. What I liked about Joomla was its nice looking back-end and stylish themes. Though the back-end wasn't the most easiest to learn, when you get the hang of it and learn the basics it all makes sense.
Installation
Installing Joomla is not very hard. Upload all the files to your server. When done, enter the domain or IP adress of your site and you should be redirected to the install folder of Joomla. Follow the simple steps and you're done.
If you run into any errors regarding "XML" or something like that you should start over again from the beginning and hopefully it works this time. It took me three installs to learn this.
Basic back-end introduction
To login to your administration panel in Joomla, simply enter http://yourdomain.com/administrator.
When you first enter your administration panel you will find a main menu consisting of different main options with sub-options if you hover over them.
Site - here is where all you main configuration settings can be changed. The primary use for this tab is to either navigate back to the administration panel or manage your users or media uploaded to the site. I often use this to navigate into my Global Configuration page.
Menus - All menus are listed here. I think this is a little complicated to comprehend in the beginning because all menus, no matter the theme you use they always have the same name, but depending on which theme you use, the menus can have different positions.
Content - here you can change content or add content to menus or pages which you have preset. This is the main disadvantage of Joomla compared to other CMSes. Joomla built for more static pages than blogs. Compared to Wordpress, Joomla is a pain to use for blogging purposes.
Components - components are the main building blocks of your site. See them as the main plugins for your site. When you hover over this tab you will see all components that are installed, click on a component name to change that components settings.
Extensions - the extension tab provides an easy way to administer your components, themes and plugins. You can install and uninstall components/themes/plugins very easy by using the extension manager. You can also edit themes and their CSS and HTML files.
Tools - this is a tab I rarely use, mostly to clean the cache, but otherwise this tab is rather unuseful.
This is just a beginning of my series introducing Joomla. More articles will come.
SEO For Drupal
Optimizing a Drupal site for search engines like Google is a peice of cake. But not too many people take this into account. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) doesn't only help other people find you easier but also makes your page more easily acessible by the search engine crawlers.
In Drupal there are some great modules for acheiving higher rankings and more search friendly pages. I will list some handy modules and how you get the most out of them.
1. Pathauto
Download and install this module. It will automatically transform your URLs and its done, but however there are some other great things we can do with this module.
Under URL aliases>Automated alias settings you will find a great number of options that you can tweak to categorize your content. If you have a lot of different content types, specify a name for each of them.
Example:
If you would like to categorize your content according to Taxonomy:
This makes it easier for the search engine to find out the subject of your content but it also makes it more appealing to visitors.
Unicode Characters in URL
I would be careful with Unicode characters in my URLs, I've noted several times that the crawlers have som problems with crawling them.
To disable unicode characters in your URL you will need to get under URL aliases>Automated alias settings>General settings and enable the Transliterate prior to creating alias option. You will also need to rename the file called i18n-ascii.example.txt to i18n-ascii.txt. In that file you can edit what characters should be transliterated as well.
Editing meta tags have been considered as not to be as important as it once was. But I think it still is a factor that should be mentioned. Adding a good meta desription of your pages does matter to the user when it scrolls through the result pages in a search engine. Some exerpts of your page done by Googles algorithm can be very wrong and inaccurate.
With this module you can edit META Keywords, Description and other sitewide META Tags.
One feature is useful is that you are able to add meta tags to your Views.
Other techniques
Hierarchy
To make your content more accessible you should practice a hierarchy model that doesnt create any pages that lies more than 3 clicks away.
The old model for showing content on your page is simply known as the Pyramid model. The model makes you navigate after menu>submenu>category>subject etc. This makes it hard for your users to find your content and spreads the power of your backlinks all over your site rendering it less powerful.
However building a site that is as flat as possible is the solutions to this. You can call the technique the Landscape model. You should post you most relevant content on your frontpage making it easily accessed. In Drupal this method is best achieved by making a View with links to your latest content and putting it in a block or just simply having the default setting of posting nodes to your frontpage.
I think Drupal is a great CMS for creating sites made for SEO. You can customize almost everything and create advanced sites not knowing a single bit of PHP and only basic HTML.
The Essential Drupal Website Creation Kit
Building websites in Drupal is really fun. It feels like i'm back playing with my lego when I was a kid.
I met Drupal about 6 months ago, and since then we've been best friends, however learning the CMS took some time and I'm still learning new things all the time. There are some modules however which I think are really essential in any standard installation of Drupal when you think of starting a new website.
These are the lifesavers:
1. Views
Views took me a while to understand but when you get the hang of it you can't be without it. It helps you create more customized nodes like pages or blocks.
Some things you can create with Views include:
Recent comments block
Gallery (when integrated with Image Upload)
Most read articles block (when integrated with Radioactivity)
Best rated content (when integrated with Fivestar)
And the list goes on.
2. Pathauto
A great module when you want to improve the usability of your site and improve your rank in the SERP's with Google. It transforms the original URL's of your site from like /node/3 to /articles/better-urls/.
3. Panels
When you care for the look of your site, panels is a great module for organizing content on your pages. You can stack blocks or Views on each other in different layouts and use different CSS files for them if you want.
4. Wysiwyg API
Creates a Wysiwyg interface when creating nodes and you can use some editors like TinyMCE or FCKeditor to make your life much easier when creating content.
When you have a big site or a lot of sites that you want to backup, this is a great module for taking backups. Very easy to backup sites and re-install them.
Actually I just discovered this module and I feel bad for not doing so earlier. The default navigation menu in drupal is horrible when your designing a website or just want to do some quick changes. This module creates a small bar in the top which looks really good and is really useful.
7. CCK
I've not yet experienced this modules true potential. But I´ve built some handy things with CCK and Views and think this one should be on this list as well.
Basically it lets you add custom fields to different content types which let you show more customized content.
This is perhaps the simplest module of them all and it does its job great. Just enter your Analytics reference number and it starts to track all your nodes and files. No more editing of files.
There are more modules out there, but these modules has a very special place in my Drupal folder but I think ill make a separate post for them.
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